Authentication for Apps and Services: Keymaster
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AUTHENTICATION FOR APPS AND SERVICES: KEYMASTER ARIEL SALOMON, LOOKOUT, INC.
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Authentication for Apps and Services: Keymaster was originally presented at Lookout's Scaling for Mobile event on July 25, 2013. Ariel Salomon is a Principal Software Engineer at Lookout, Inc. Ariel's talk focused on setting up authentication between mobile apps and services. He gives a great overview of Keymaster. Lookout has grown immensely in the last year. We've doubled the size of the company—added more than 80 engineers to the team, support 45+ million users, have over 1000 machines in production, see over 125,000 QPS and more than 2.6 billion requests/month. Our analysts use Hadoop, Hive, and MySQL to interactively manipulate multibillion row tables. With that, there are bound to be some growing pains and lessons learned.
Transcript of Authentication for Apps and Services: Keymaster
AUTHENTICATION FOR APPS AND SERVICES:
KEYMASTERARIEL SALOMON, LOOKOUT, INC.
SO YOU’RE BUILDING AN APP
SO YOU’RE BUILDING AN APP
WITH A BACK-END IN THE CLOUD
HOW DO YOU AUTHENTICATE REQUESTS?
AUTH(ENTICATION) VS. AUTH(ORIZATION)
• Authentication is about validating that you are who you say you are
• Verify that a credential is correct
• Authorization is about what you are allowed to do
• In general, Authorization is closely tied to your application
SIMPLE AUTHENTICATION SCHEME
• App knows some username and password
• Every time you need to do anything, include that in the request
WHY NOT?
PROBLEMS W/ SIMPLE AUTH
• The app needs to keep it’s credentials secure
• Every request embeds the credentials; can they be snooped?
• What happens as we scale up the system
• Your system is getting more complicated
• More than one service providing functionality• They all need to share
authentication• AUTHORIZATION will
vary
SCALING UP
App
Service B
Service A
• Now we scale up our back-end: apps talks to multiple services
• How does Service B verify credentials?
• Options• Ask Service A
SCALING UP
App
Service B
Service A
• Now we scale up our back-end: apps talks to multiple services
• How does Service B verify credentials?
• Options• Ask Service A
SCALING UP
App
Service B
Service A
Service B
Service B
Service B
Service B
Service B
Service B
Service B
Service Z
• Now we scale up our back-end: apps talks to multiple services
• How does Service B verify credentials?
• Options• Ask Service A• Create yet another
service, ask it..• Do some caching?
SCALING UP
App
Service B
Service A
Auth Service
A BETTER WAY
• Signed tokens verify that authentication has happened
• One service knows how to authenticate for apps, and provides tokens
• Any service can receive the tokens and verify a client without any other network traffic
• App gets a long-lasting token
• Services don’t take a network hit to handle authentication
SCALING UP WITH TOKENS
App
Service B
Service A
Auth Service
KEYMASTER TOKENS
• Signed tokens based on Java Web Token (JWT) standard [in process at IETF]
• Each token contains claims:
• sub: Subject, the device or account being identified
• iss: The token Issuer
• exp: Expiration date-time
• From the device (app) perspective, they are opaque
KEYMASTER
• To validate tokens, a service must know public keys for other services
• Keymaster service can provide this:
• Use the issuer embedded in the token to identify the key
• Ask Keymaster for a public key
• cache this for a long time
KEYMASTER BETWEEN SERVICES
• Any service can generate tokens
• Can include information in the tokens that should be signed, encrypted
Keep in touch with
@lookout
/mylookout
blog.lookout.com
http://bit.ly/scaling-for-mobile
