Plugin Auth

We have seen that one way of implementing custom authentication logic is by providing your own auth server. While this approach gives you great freedom, it also comes at a cost:

• You have to write and manage an additional service. If your authentication logic is simple, the plumbing needed to get it running might constitute a significant overhead.
• If your custom auth server serves only as an adapter for your existing auth service, it will introduce an additional network hop with the associated latency to any request that needs to be authenticated; either that, or you will most likely need to update your existing service so that it can conform to the request/response format expected by Gloo Edge.
• You likely want to be able to define configuration for your auth server and that configuration should be context-specific, e.g. based on which virtual host is serving the request. You could store this configuration outside of Gloo Edge (e.g. in a dedicated Kubernetes CRD) and try to derive the context from the request itself, but this would introduce additional latency and negate the benefits of the centralized control plane that Gloo Edge provides.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to write just the authentication logic you need, plug it into Gloo Edge, and be able to provide your specific configuration right on the Virtual Services it applies to? Starting with Gloo Edge Enterprise, release 0.18.11+, you can do just that!

In this guide we will show you how easy it is to extend Gloo Edge’s Ext Auth server via Go plugins.

{"level":"error","ts":1582578689.0415232,"logger":"extauth.ext-auth-service","caller":"service/extauth.go:58","msg":"Error while authorizing request","error":"empty config set","stacktrace":...}

{"level":"info","ts":1582578688.078688,"logger":"extauth","caller":"runner/run.go:158","msg":"got new config","config":[{"auth_config_ref_name":"gloo-system.plugin-auth","configs":[{"AuthConfig":{"plugin_auth":{"name":"RequiredHeader","plugin_file_name":"RequiredHeader.so","exported_symbol_name":"Plugin","config":{"fields":{"AllowedValues":{"Kind":{"list_value":{"values":[{"Kind":{"string_value":"foo"}},{"Kind":{"string_value":"bar"}}]}}},"RequiredHeader":{"Kind":{"string_value":"my-auth-header"}}}}}}}]}]}

Development workflow overview

Following are the high-level steps required to use your auth plugins with Gloo Edge. Through the course of this guide we will see each one of them in greater detail.

1. Write a plugin and publish it as a docker image which, when run, copies the compiled plugin file(s) to a predefined directory.
2. Configure Gloo Edge to load the plugins by running the image as an initContainer on the extauth deployment. This can be done by installing Gloo Edge with dedicated value overrides or by modifying the Gloo Edge YAML manifest manually.
3. Reference your plugin in your Virtual Services for it to be invoked for requests matching particular virtual hosts or routes.

Building an Ext Auth plugin

The official Go docs define a plugin as:

“a Go main package with exported functions and variables that has been built with: go build -buildmode=plugin”

In order for Gloo Edge to be able to load your plugin, the plugin’s main package must export a variable that implements the ExtAuthPlugin interface:

type ExtAuthPlugin interface {
	NewConfigInstance(ctx context.Context) (configInstance interface{}, err error)
	GetAuthService(ctx context.Context, configInstance interface{}) (AuthService, error)
}

Check the plugin developer guide for a detailed explanation of the API.

For this guide we will use a simple example plugin that has already been built. You can find the source code to build it yourself here.

The plugin authorizes requests if:

1. they contain a certain header, and
2. the value for the header is in a predefined whitelist.

The main package for the plugin looks like this:

package main

import (
	"github.com/solo-io/ext-auth-plugins/api"
	impl "github.com/solo-io/ext-auth-plugins/plugins/required_header/pkg"
)

func main() {}

// This is the exported variable that Gloo Edge will look for. It implements the ExtAuthPlugin interface.
var Plugin impl.RequiredHeaderPlugin

We leave it up to you to inspect the simple impl.RequiredHeaderPlugin object. Of interest here is the following configuration object it uses:

type Config struct {
	RequiredHeader string
	AllowedValues  []string
}

The values in this struct will determine the aforementioned header and whitelist.

Packaging and publishing the plugin

Ext Auth plugins must be made available to Gloo Edge in the form of container images. The images must contain the compiled plugins and copy these files to the /auth-plugins when they are run.

In this guide we will use the image for the RequiredHeaderPlugin introduced above. It has been built using this Dockerfile and can be found in the quay.io/solo-io/ext-auth-plugins docker repository. We publish a new version of this plugin with each Gloo Edge Enterprise release to ensure compatibility with that release. Let’s inspect the plugin image for version 0.20.6:

docker run -it --entrypoint ls quay.io/solo-io/ext-auth-plugins:0.20.6 -l compiled-auth-plugins
total 28356
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root      29033320 Oct 25 21:41 RequiredHeader.so

You can see that it contains the compiled plugin file RequiredHeader.so.

Configuring Gloo Edge

Installation

Let’s start by installing Gloo Edge Enterprise. We need to customize the standard installation to configure Gloo Edge to use our plugin; we can do that by defining the following plugin-values.yaml value file:

cat << EOF > plugin-values.yaml
global:
  extensions:
    extAuth:
      plugins:
        my-plugin:
          image:
            repository: ext-auth-plugins
            registry: quay.io/solo-io
            pullPolicy: IfNotPresent
            tag: 1.3.0 # change this to your Gloo Edge Enterprise installation version
EOF

In the above file, global.extensions.extAuth.plugins is a map where:

• each key is an arbitrary string that will be used to identify the plugin container (in this case my-plugin)
• the correspondent value is a reference to a container image that contains the plugin file

Now we can use this file to install Gloo Edge:

glooctl install gateway enterprise --license-key $GLOO_LICENSE_KEY --values plugin-values.yaml

If we now inspect the extauth deployment by running

kubectl get deployment -n gloo-system extauth -o yaml

we should see the following information (non-relevant attributes have been omitted for brevity):

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  labels:
    app: gloo
    gloo: extauth
  name: extauth
  namespace: gloo-system
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      gloo: extauth
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        gloo: extauth
    spec:
      containers:
      - image: quay.io/solo-io/extauth-ee:1.3.0
        imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
        name: extauth
        resources: {}
        volumeMounts:
        - mountPath: /auth-plugins
          name: auth-plugins
      initContainers:
      - image: quay.io/solo-io/ext-auth-plugins:1.3.0
        imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
        name: plugin-my-plugin
        volumeMounts:
        - mountPath: /auth-plugins
          name: auth-plugins
      volumes:
      - emptyDir: {}
        name: auth-plugins

Each plugin container image built as described in the Packaging and publishing the plugin section has been added as an initContainer to the extauth deployment. A volume named auth-plugins is mounted in the initContainers and the extauth container at /auth-plugins path: when the initContainers are run, they will copy the compiled plugin files they contain (in this case RequiredHeader.so) to the shared volume, where they become available to the extauth server.

Let’s verify that the extauth server did successfully start by checking its logs.

kubectl logs -n gloo-system deployment/extauth

returns

{"level":"info","ts":1573567317.1261566,"logger":"extauth","caller":"runner/run.go:86","msg":"Starting ext-auth server"}
{"level":"info","ts":1573567317.1262844,"logger":"extauth","caller":"runner/run.go:105","msg":"extauth server running in [gRPC] mode, listening at [:8083]"}

Create a simple Virtual Service

Let’s deploy a sample application that we will route requests to when testing our auth plugin:

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/solo-io/gloo/v1.14.x/example/petstore/petstore.yaml

Create a Virtual Service

Now we can create a Virtual Service that routes all requests (note the / prefix) to the petstore service.

apiVersion: gateway.solo.io/v1
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
  name: petstore
  namespace: gloo-system
spec:
  virtualHost:
    domains:
    - '*'
    routes:
    - matchers:
      - prefix: /
      routeAction:
        single:
          kube:
            ref:
              name: petstore
              namespace: default
            port: 8080

To verify that the Virtual Service works, let’s send a request to /api/pets:

curl $(glooctl proxy url)/api/pets

You should see the following output:

[{"id":1,"name":"Dog","status":"available"},{"id":2,"name":"Cat","status":"pending"}]

Secure the Virtual Service

As we just saw, we were able to reach the upstream without having to provide any credentials. This is because by default Gloo Edge allows any request on routes that do not specify authentication configuration. Let’s change this behavior. We will update the Virtual Service so that only requests containing a header named my-header whose value is either foo or bar are allowed.

Create an AuthConfig resource

Let’s start by creating and AuthConfig CRD with that will use our plugin:

apiVersion: enterprise.gloo.solo.io/v1
kind: AuthConfig
metadata:
  name: plugin-auth
  namespace: gloo-system
spec:
  configs:
  - pluginAuth:
      name: RequiredHeader
      pluginFileName: RequiredHeader.so
      exportedSymbolName: Plugin
      config:
        RequiredHeader: my-header
        AllowedValues:
        - foo
        - bar

When referenced on a Virtual Service, this configuration will instruct Gloo Edge to authenticate requests using our plugin. Let’s examine the structure of the pluginAuth object:

• name: the name of the plugin. This serves mainly for display purposes, but is also used to build the default values for the next two fields.
• pluginFileName: the name of the compiled plugin that was copied to the /auth-plugins directory. Defaults to <name>.so.
• exportedSymbolName: the name of the exported symbol Gloo Edge will look for when loading the plugin. Defaults to <name>.
• config: information that will be used to configure your plugin. Gloo Edge will attempt to parse the value of this attribute into the object pointer returned by your plugin’s NewConfigInstance function implementation. In our case this will be an instance of *Config, as seen in the Building an Ext Auth plugin section.

Update the Virtual Service

Once the AuthConfig has been created, we can use it to secure our Virtual Service:

apiVersion: gateway.solo.io/v1
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
  name: petstore
  namespace: gloo-system
spec:
  virtualHost:
    domains:
    - '*'
    routes:
    - matchers:
      - prefix: /
      routeAction:
        single:
          kube:
            ref:
              name: petstore
              namespace: default
            port: 8080
    options:
      extauth:
        configRef:
          name: plugin-auth
          namespace: gloo-system

After apply-ing this Virtual Service, let’s check the extauth logs again:

kubectl logs -n gloo-system deployment/extauth

returns

{"level":"info","ts":1573567317.1261566,"logger":"extauth","caller":"runner/run.go:86","msg":"Starting ext-auth server"}
{"level":"info","ts":1573567317.1262844,"logger":"extauth","caller":"runner/run.go:105","msg":"extauth server running in [gRPC] mode, listening at [:8083]"}
{"level":"info","ts":1573574476.3094413,"logger":"extauth","caller":"runner/run.go:160","msg":"got new config","config":[{"auth_config_ref_name":"gloo-system.plugin-auth","AuthConfig":null,"configs":[{"AuthConfig":{"plugin_auth":{"name":"RequiredHeader","plugin_file_name":"RequiredHeader.so","exported_symbol_name":"Plugin","config":{"fields":{"AllowedValues":{"Kind":{"ListValue":{"values":[{"Kind":{"StringValue":"foo"}},{"Kind":{"StringValue":"bar"}}]}}},"RequiredHeader":{"Kind":{"StringValue":"my-header"}}}}}}}]}]}
{"level":"info","ts":1573574476.3579354,"logger":"extauth.header_value_plugin","caller":"pkg/impl.go:39","msg":"Parsed RequiredHeaderAuthService config","requiredHeader":"my-header","allowedHeaderValues":["foo","bar"]}

From the last two lines we can see that the Ext Auth server received the new configuration for our Virtual Service.

Test our configuration

If we try to hit our route again, we should see a 403 response:

curl -v $(glooctl proxy url)/api/pets

returns

> GET /api/pets HTTP/1.1
> Host: 192.168.99.100:30834
> User-Agent: curl/7.54.0
> Accept: */*
>
< HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
< date: Tue, 12 Nov 2019 16:03:42 GMT
< server: envoy
< content-length: 0
<

If you recall the structure of our plugin, it will only allow request with a given header (in this case my-header) and where that header has an expected value (in this case one of foo or bar). If we include a header with these properties in our request, we will be able to hit our sample service:

curl -v -H "my-header: foo" $(glooctl proxy url)/api/pets

> GET /api/pets HTTP/1.1
> Host: 192.168.99.100:30834
> User-Agent: curl/7.54.0
> Accept: */*
> my-header: foo
>
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< content-type: application/xml
< date: Tue, 12 Nov 2019 16:05:05 GMT
< content-length: 86
< x-envoy-upstream-service-time: 3
< server: envoy
<
[{"id":1,"name":"Dog","status":"available"},{"id":2,"name":"Cat","status":"pending"}]

Summary

In this guide we installed Gloo Edge Enterprise and configured it to load a sample Go plugin that implements custom auth logic. Then we created a simple Virtual Service to route requests to a test upstream. Finally, we updated the Virtual Service to use our plugin and saw how requests are allowed or denied based on the custom configuration for our plugin.

You can cleanup the resources created while following this guide by running:

glooctl uninstall --all
kubectl delete -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/solo-io/gloo/v1.14.x/example/petstore/petstore.yaml

Next steps

As a next step, check out our plugin developer guide for a detailed tutorial on how to build your own external auth plugins!