What Self-Hosted Single Sign-On (SSO) do you use?

I have a lot of different services which I self host for me and my family like:

  • PeerTube
  • Lemmy
  • Mastodon
  • Synology NAS
  • TTRSS
  • NextCloud
  • Matrix
  • HomeAssistant
  • etc.

Right now every family member needs to create a user on each of those services and have a different password on them, which is OK when you use a Password Manager, but most of my extended family members don’t. And they often forget their password and stop using the service because they can’t figure out how to reset the password with each and every service.

I would like to try to consolidate all of it with a Single Sign-On (SSO) solution but It’s not obvious to me if there is one which is not overly over engineered for hundreds of thousands of users but small and lightweight, perhaps even easy to set up.

I tried OpenLDAP but Jesus that was very involved.

namelivia,

I use Pomerium! www.pomerium.com/docs

monotux,

I use authelia. It’s pretty straight forward to get started with, I just use the yaml user file and a SQLite database for sessions. I’m running it in podman with auto updates enabled for the tag I’m using (can’t remember which tag, but not latest).

I then use their tutorials as a base for the systems I want to use oidc with (grafana, miniflux…), or just redirect traffic through my reverse proxy to services that lacks proper authentication (looking at you, *arr stack).

I use caddy and traefik for reverse proxy, and it’s very simple to use forward_auth and similar with it.

It took an evening to figure it out but it’s well worth it!

yiliu,

What I would dearly like is an SSO system that can also act as a drop-in replacement for Kerberos. Existing krb5 servers (on Linux) are ancient, quirky, and underdocumented, but kerberos is so useful at a CLI level. I’ve always maintained separate LDAP & Kerberos instances, and the thing stopping me from moving to something more modern is that I’m holding out for that kerberos feature…

philwinder,

Might not be quite what you want, but if you just need to block all access to everything unless logged in, then integrating a hosted SSO into your ingress is a simple, low management option.

I've been using an old trafeik setup with Google's SSO, whitelisting certain accounts, and had no problems with it for years.

poVoq,
@poVoq@slrpnk.net avatar

github.com/lldap/lldap is nice and easy.

jeena,
@jeena@jemmy.jeena.net avatar

So I was able to test NextCloud as the provider with PeerTube as the client and it works but there is no way to connect this new login with a already existing user which is terrible 😭 . To get this working I would need to create new users and then move all the videos to those new users.

I gues this problem exists with every of those services which my family already has in use … so it’s mostly practical for new services I guess?

RegalPotoo,
@RegalPotoo@lemmy.world avatar

I use Keycloak and OpenLDAP, but if I was setting it up again I’d probably just use Authentik

ace,
@ace@lemmy.ananace.dev avatar

Personally using Dex, it’s about as lightweight as you can get, it can be configured with a single configuration file on disk, and it runs entirely stateless as well.

It only deals with authentication delegation though, unlike larger systems like Keycloak.

nakal,
@nakal@kbin.social avatar

I used plain Kerberos. I stopped, because sometimes I don't want to be logged in automatically. Privacy and multi-account systems get more difficult.

loke,

Same. I still use Kerberos, but I use kinit manually when I want to authenticate. It does force me to type the password more often but the benefits outweigh that.

nickwitha_k,

I’d suggest something like Keycloak or earning the wizard robe and beard by buckling down and learning OpenLDAP. The biggest suggestion that I have though is to have a disaster recovery plan for even your auth system goes down. Don’t be like Facebook and lock yourself out without any hope of regaining entry (or, if you’re a fan of Russian Roulette, do).

Deebster,
@Deebster@lemmyrs.org avatar

What's your DR plan? My "plan" is to SSH in and figure out what's wrong.

nickwitha_k,

I’m still trying to cover up with a good one to allow more self-hosting. Probably a SHTF security key kept in a safe that can be used with physical access.

My “plan” is to SSH in and figure out what’s wrong.

The problem here being that you have a circular dependency:

  1. SSH auth requires OpenLDAP/Keycloak
  2. SSH access is required to fix broken OpenLDAP/Keycloak
  3. GOTO 1
Deebster,
@Deebster@lemmyrs.org avatar

My SSH auth uses SSH keys stored in authorized_keys, but I see your point. For me, OpenLDAP will be letting users in to the various services and SSH is outside that. I suppose SFTP could be something I want, but I'd be tempted to put a new sshd inside a container and have it more restricted than the system one.

I think the backup key idea is definitely the most broadly applicable, but there's physical/KVM for a more old school access route.

nickwitha_k,

That makes sense. I like the idea of combining physical key with physical/KVM access so that there is no password auth (at least, not without a second factor).

vegetaaaaaaa, (edited )
@vegetaaaaaaa@lemmy.world avatar

I tried OpenLDAP but Jesus that was very involved.

OpenLDAP is easy :) Once you understand LDAP concepts.

Check this and read through the tasks/ directory (particularly https://github.com/nodiscc/xsrv/blob/master/roles/openldap/tasks/openldap.yml and https://github.com/nodiscc/xsrv/blob/master/roles/openldap/tasks/populate.yml. It sets up everything needed for an LDAP authentication service (if you don’t use ansible you can still read what the tasks do and you should get a pretty good understanding of what’s needed, if not let me know).

In short you need:

  • slapd (the OpenLDAP server)
  • set up a base LDAP directory structure (OUs/Organizational Units, I only use 3 OUs: system, users and groups)
  • an admin user in the LDAP directory (mine is admin directly at the base of the LDAP directory)
  • (optional but recommended) a so-called bind user in the LDAP directory (unvprivileged account that can only list/read users/groups) (mine is bind under the system OU)
  • (optional) groups to map users to their roles (e.g. only users in access_jellyfin are allowed to login to jellyfin)
  • actual user accounts, member of one or more groups if needed

When you login to an application/service configured to use the LDAP authentication backend, it connects to the LDAP directory using the bind user credentials, and checks that the user exists (depending on how you configured the application either by name, uid, email…) , that the password you provided matches the hash stored in the LDAP directory, optionally that the user is part of the required groups. Then it allows or denies access.

There’s not much else to it:

  • you can also do without the bind account but I wouldn’t recommend it (either configure your applications to use the admin user in which case they have admin access to the LDAP directory… not good. Or allow anonymous read-only access to the LDAP directory - also not ideal).
  • slapd stores its configuration (admin user/password, log level…) inside the LDAP directory itself as attributes of a special entity (cn=config), so to access or modify it you have to use LDIF files and the ldapadd/ldapmodify commands, or use a convenient wrapper like the ansible modules tools used above.
  • once this is set up, you can forget LDIF files and use a web interface to manage contents of the LDAP directory.
  • OUs and groups are different and do not serve the same purpose, OUs are just hierarchical levels (like folders) inside your LDAP tree. groups can contain multiple users/users can have multiple groups so they’re like “labels” without a notion of hierarchy. You can do without OUs and stash everything at the top level of the directory, but it’s messy.
  • users (or other entities) have several attributes (common name, firstname, lastname, email, uid, password, description… it can contain anything really, it’s just a directory service)
  • LDAP is hierarchical by nature, so user with Common Name (CN) jane.doe in OU users in the directory for domain example.org has the Distinguished Name (DC) cn=jane.doe,ou=users,dc=example,dc=org. Think of it like /path/to/file.
  • to look for a particular object you use filters which are just a search syntax to match specific entities (object classes) (users are inetOrgPersons, groups are posixGroups…) and attributes (uid, cn, email, phonenumber…). Usually applications that support LDAP come with predefined filters to look for users in specific groups, etc.
DolceTriade,

I’ve found Zitadel to be the best open source Oauth2 provider. It also supports terraform for a fully IaC approach to declaring your users and their permissions.

Onion6068,

I can only support that. This is what I am running for my small business as well and it’s been super smooth for roughly a year now! Especially self service and auto-registering based on domain names turned out to be really nice features (for a business). In my homelab I just enjoy having a nice ui.

https://github.com/zitadel/zitadel

https://zitadel.com/

I came from Authentik which was nice too but nowhere as feature rich as zitadel.

citizen,

I started integrating Authentik lately based on seeing people recommend it. It has pretty steep learning curve. I had to follow tutorials and even then each integration have its own quirks. I got stuck on integrating my internal e-mail server with ldap provider (via authentik). It’s definitely capable but it’s a project to integrate all services.

joe,

I switched from Keycloak to Authentik because I thought it would be simpler. In some ways it is, but in others it so isn’t.

Still like it though.

btobolaski,

I really like Authentik after using keycloak for quite a while.

warmaster,

How would you compare it ?

Lem453,

Other SSO options are just a tough if not more complex than authentik. If you use docker and are self hosting, this is a great option. Provides basically every SSO option to connect all your services, especially if you combine it with a good reverse proxy like traefik to provide SSO to simple webapps.

If you are setting up a self hosted infrastructure and have some experience, I highly recommend checking out techno Tim’s “ssl everywhere” video for wild card ssl with traefik and then combine that with authentik for SSO with both local only and internet accessible apps.

gabe565,
@gabe565@lemmy.cook.gg avatar

+1 for Authentik! It definitely has a steep learning curve, but once you get comfortable with it, it’s really versatile. The integration docs have tons of walkthroughs for setting up Authentik with different apps which is epecially helpful when getting started.

chiisana,
@chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net avatar

I started trying out FusionAuth and it’s been pretty neat. I off-load my auth to Google because I don’t want yet another username/password nor do I want to be responsible in storing it, but you can certainly use built-in auth if your objective is to stop using external auth. I currently have my Kasm Workspace deployed behind it, so when user lands on Kasm, they get bounced to FusionAuth where there’s a login prompt and Login w/ Google button; when they authenticate (be it through built-in auth or Google in my case), they get bounced back to Kasm Workspace in their account. This was deployed using docker compose, so I just annotate containers I want to protect w/ some labels, traefik handles all the glue work. I really like the way it worked out.

I’d imagine something like Authelia, which gets pushed a lot as well, would be able to offer a similar if not identical workflow.

For Lemmy, at this time, I don’t think it is possible to gate it like that, otherwise inbound federation (i.e.: comment replies to this post) won’t make it into your instance.

outcide,
@outcide@lemmy.world avatar

At the moment I only use lldap. I’ll probably add Authelia at some point …

chandz05,

I use Authelia with lldap and it’s pretty straightforward to setup. Once Authelia is up and running, it’s quite nice managing users and groups through the lldap interface

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