I have AWS K8s cluster(EKS) and I want to use AWS API gateway to protect endpoints and separate authorization logic from microservices. I need to have 2 authentication schemas:
Send login/password and get JWT
OAuth2
There is an integration between API gateway and K8s cluster via ALB Ingress Controller. It looks fine. Then I need to authenticate somehow. AWS provides Cognito as a service to manage users and the possibility to have your own identity provider. I know that we can integrate API gateway authorizer with Cognito, but I can't understand the following things:
How to integrate Cognito with already existed LDAP for example? (SAML?)
Can I use my own already created OAuth2 authentication endpoint?
How Can I authenticate with login/password and retrieve JWT using API gateway+Cognito?
1 How to integrate Cognito with already existed LDAP for example? (SAML?)
Make use of Cognito Userpools with SAML IDP.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cognito/latest/developerguide/cognito-user-pools-saml-idp.html
2 Can I use my own already created OAuth2 authentication endpoint?
Yes, use Developer Authenticated Identities for Cognito Identity Pools.
Users that authenticate from the existing user database will be authorized by identity pools through assuming the authenticated IAM role of the identity pool, in that role set the access level to AWS resources.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cognito/latest/developerguide/developer-authenticated-identities.html
3 How Can I authenticate with login/password and retrieve JWT using API gateway+Cognito?
Best way to achieve this seeing that API Gateway is being used is to implement a Lambda authorizer in API gateway that uses Cognito Userpools. You will then be able to get the JWT token in that Lambda authorizer, the claims in the authorizer will also be available in the integration request vtl and accessible using $context . i.e.
$context.authorizer.claims.sub
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/latest/developerguide/apigateway-integrate-with-cognito.html
Related
In API gateway you can setup a Cognito Authorizer that references a Cognito User Pool for authentication. For verification, API Gateway expects the Cognito User Pool JWT token to be set in the Authorization header.
Using 'aws-sdk' and 'amazon-cognito-identity-js' NPM packages, how can I create guest/unauthenticated users and retrieve the JWT token to pass to API Gateway? By Guest/unauthenticated, I mean not even having a username or email. Or, is this not possible with the current APIs?
Amplify (built on top of Cognito) appears to have something similar: https://docs.amplify.aws/sdk/auth/guest-access/q/platform/android
Thoughts?
Cognito User Pool is an authentication provider. This is separate from unauthenticated access that is provided by Identity pool. You cannot use the default cognito authorizer in API Gateway for validating the token. However, you can use a custom lambda authorizer that will take token and confirm it is valid for your identity pool.
I'm not clear on how to send credentials and IAM access to an API gateway. This seems clear:
There is the tutorial on AWS but this is not the way I wanted to access my API.
API Gateway example
As most would know, you put your AWS Key and Secret key in a configuration file that lives in .AWS on the userspace of the user but if you are using a website, for example, you won't have that. Is the idea that anytime a user access the API that you put that user in an anonymous group that has access to the .credentials file?
You are describing IAM authentication for API Gateways. For your of your web app to generate IAM credentials I would recommend using a Cognito Identity Pool Authenticated Role. The Cognito Identity Pool Authenticated Role Exchanges a JWT for the AWS IAM credentialsthat are used in API calls. Your users will first authenticate against the identity pool. The identity pool even allows for unauthenticated users that are using your registered app to generate credentials with permissions which you specify. This guide will show you how to generate these credentials in your code.
Alternatively you can use API Gateway Identity Pool Authorizer or API Gateway Lambda Authorizer to secure your API.
I have a lambda function running behind the aws api gateway, that acts as the backend for my website. It uses a cognito authorizer to authenticate the users of my website. This works fine.
Now I need to authenticate a c# backend service against the api that is not running in the cloud has no user interaction. It should just synchronize data.
My initial plan was to configure cognito credentials and log into the cloud via the cognito sdk but this is not possible as the app would then need developer access to my cloud.
I also thought about using the api gateway api keys but I would still need the cognito authentication then.
So how can I authenticate my c# service against my aws api without user interaction being nessecary?
You could use Cognito User Pool Authentication.
This is an OpenID implementation where Cognito issues JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) where the signature of a JWT can be verified with a public endpoint.
In the context of API Gateway, you would use a Lambda as a custom authorizer, but the tokens could be verified in any environment/language with a relevant JWT Library.
More reading: Verifying a JWT issued by Cognito
We have our rest API deployed on AWS Lambda behind API Gateway. For users that use our web client, they are authenticated using API Gateway Authorizer through JWT token from Cognito.
Now we want to give users the ability to create their own API credentials (API key and secrets) so that they can use the REST APIs directly without using the web client. How can we achieve that?
yes you can do it you can use federated identity and make user to signup and they can get their own api key and secrets. you can also change the flow of the cognito as per your need and make new lambda and add it to cognito as trigger.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cognito/latest/developerguide/cognito-identity.html
I'm using AWS Gateway as my web API with AWS Lambda as my serverless backend. Lambda functions are only invoked by my Gateway APIs. Through Lambda I call and execute operations on other AWS Services (RDS, SNS, etc.).
I want only my clients to get access to my web APIs. To do so I setup all of my Gateway APIs with AWS_IAM authorization. An unauthenticated client have only policies that let him invoke e.g. the function for login/sign up a user. In comparison an authenticated client have policies that enables him to access more recourses.
The question now is: Because I only want my clients to get access to my Gateway APIs and to do it as secure as possible, is it necessary to create a custom authorizer which checks the validity of tokens?
Neither I did setup a cognito user pool, nor I did setup a external public provider (google, Facebook, openId, amazon, etc.). I'm working with custom developer authenticated identities. All users are saved in AWS RDS. When a user tries to login and gets correctly authenticated through his email and password a open id and a jwt token is returned to the client. This is done by invoking 'getOpenIdTokenForDeveloperIdentity'.
I found some recourses on the web where people created a custom authorizer, but they did always verify the validity of the token by a external provider (google, facebook, auth0, etc.). This member did wrote that you only need to have a external provider when you have "[...]some totally different auth logic[...]" https://stackoverflow.com/a/39407156/5181862. And I don't think this is the case here.
The clients that run the application are iOS and later Android devices, if this information is necessary.
If all the APIs have AWS_IAM authorization, that is already pretty secure. AWS_IAM requires that the client have valid AWS credentials from the same account as the API (your account).
It sounds like you are using Cognito (talking about unauthenticated client policy), in which case your authorization model is secure if implemented correctly.