Basically every local service is accessed via a web interface, and every interface wants a username and password. Assuming none of these services are exposed to the internet, how much effort do you put into security here?
Personally, I didn’t really think about it when I started. I make a half-assed effort at security where I don’t use “admin” or anything obvious as the username, and I use a decent-but-not-industrial password - but I started reusing the u/p as the number of services I’m running grew. I have my browsers remember the u/ps.
Should one go farther than this? And if so, what’s the threat model? Is there an easier way?
I’ve been looking into some kind of simple SSO to handle this. I’m tired of entering passwords (even if it’s all done by the password manager) a single authentication point with a single user would be great.
Keycloak and friend are way too complex. Ideally I would like to have something in my nginx reverse proxies that would handle authentication at that level and tell the final app what user is logged on in some safe way.
Never tried Authelia or Authentik but I’ve heard good things about them. I’m sure one of them will integrate with a reverse proxy.
Those solutions are still way too complex and corporate to my likes. :(
I’d like to encourage you to take another look at Authentik, it sounds like their Proxy Provider is exactly what you’re looking for: https://docs.goauthentik.io/docs/providers/proxy/
Authentik can certainly get complex, but only if you want/need it to. It is by far the most user-friendly IDP solution I’ve found, especially for what it offers. Their docs also have step-by-step guides for how to integrate a lot of popular self-hosted apps.
Only takes a couple mins to spin up a test environment using their Docker compose file: https://docs.goauthentik.io/docs/installation/docker-compose
Thanks, I’ll have another look.
For sure! If you do end up taking it for a spin, feel free to ping me with any questions.
Too much pieces that can potentially break. I’ve been looking at http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_auth_request_module.html and there’s this https://github.com/kendokan/phpAuthRequest that is way more self contained and simple to maintain long term. The only issue I’m facing with that solution is that I’m yet capable of passing a token / username in a header to the final application.
any oauth (I use kanidm) and oauth2-proxy solves that and now you can easily use passkeys to log into your intranet resources.
Is there a passkey setup that’s easy to self host? I think passkeys with a backup would be best.
Hmm this is actually interesting, passkeys would indeed make things simpler.