Jens Langhammer

authentik is an open source Identity Provider that unifies your identity needs into a single platform, replacing Okta, Active Directory, and auth0. Authentik Security is a public benefit company building on top of the open source project.

We are pleased to share our latest version, authentik 2024.8. This release adds substantial new support for property mappings for both providers and external sources, RBAC permissions management via blueprints and Terraform, a new policy for GeoIP, as well as several UX and DX enhancements.

Highlights​

One of the many highlights that we are most excited about is the new support for using property mappings to manage user data from external sources (such as Google and GitHub). You can configure property mappings to define how the external source's user credentials and data are synced with authentik, where to store (or not store!) data, and other specific behaviour. Groups can be synced from all sources that provide group information.

Release 2024.8 also includes support for custom attributes with the RADIUS provider. By adding custom, vendor-specific attributes to the RADIUS response packets, based on the exact user who is authenticating, you can more fully integrate RADIUS into network infrastructure.

Another new feature in version 2024.8 is SAML encryption support for both source and provider, which encrypts the information of in-flight assertions.

For those who rely on automation, this release provides RBAC support for blueprints and Terraform; Permissions can now be assigned and automated using both blueprints and Terraform.

We have also simplified the LDAP provider search permissions; you no longer need to create a special group and assign users to it to define who can search the full directory. Now you need only assign the permission Search full LDAP directory to the LDAP provider. When you upgrade to 2024.8, authentik automatically migrates your old search groups to the new RBAC-based method.

There is a new GeoIP-based policy for simple GeoIP lookups, such as country or ASN matching. For a more advanced GeoIP lookup, use an Expression policy.

authentik is an open source Identity Provider that unifies your identity needs into a single platform, replacing Okta, Active Directory, and Auth0. Authentik Security is a public benefit company building on top of the open source project.

Login boxes, MFA prompts, retyping blurry CAPTCHA characters… the routine is so familiar that we could say it’s really pure muscle memory that logs most users in to their target application. With most legacy identity providers, a one-size-fits-none experience can throw unnecessary hurdles in some users' way, while allowing other sensitive actions without sufficient security checks.

With authentik, using our flows to define and customize that mundane user experience, you can safeguard against the mistakes and security hiccups that muscle memory actions can produce, and create a flexible, customized workflow for authentication and access.

In this article, we take a closer look at these major components of authentik, and how they work together as fundamental building blocks to create a powerful yet flexible user authentication process.

Let’s dive in and take a closer look at how flows, stages, and their associated policies are used in authentik.

What are flows, stages, and policies?​

They are the major building blocks in authentik, and are used to define the login and authentication steps taken by a user.

From the authentik documentation’s terminology page:

• Flows are an ordered sequence of stages. These flows can be used to define how a user authenticates, enrolls, logs out, recovers their account,etc. Flows are YAML files.
• A stage represents a single verification or logic step. They are used to authenticate users, enroll users, and more. These stages can optionally be applied to a flow via policies.
• Policies are, at a base level a policy, a yes/no gate. The criteria that are defined in a policy will evaluate to True or False depending on the type of policy and settings. This can be used to conditionally and dynamically apply specific stages to a flow, grant/deny access to various objects, and for other custom logic.

One of our users wrote about self-hosting authentik, and included a great description of authentik’s flows and stages:

“First, you define Stages that represent a single step of authentication — something like requiring a user to enter their username or a password. There's a whole lot to choose from. Once you've set up your Stages, you'll create a Flow, stringing those Stages together until you have a complete process to authenticate, register, or even delete a user.” Nick Telsan

authentik is an open source Identity Provider that unifies your identity needs into a single platform, replacing Okta, Active Directory, and auth0. Authentik Security is a public benefit company building on top of the open source project.

“How to be great? Just be good, repeatably.”

Consistency is often credited as more important to success than bursts of inspiration. However when we’re talking about startups, standardization and innovation are often presented as conflicting mindsets. Standardization is for scaleups and enterprises, introduced around the same time as red tape and bureaucracy. Innovation is for scrappy startups, along with “move fast and break things” and “do things that don’t scale”.

Authentik Security is just over a year old, you can still count our team members on your hands, and we do a bit of both. Here are some things we’ve standardized that have helped us be more efficient (and where we’ve kept things fluid).

authentik is an open source Identity Provider that unifies your identity needs into a single platform, replacing Okta, Active Directory, and auth0. Authentik Security is a public benefit company building on top of the open source project.

We are happy to announce that 2024 is going great, with our second release of the year adding important new functionality for Admins, developers, and end users. Take a look at the new features included in the release, check out the Release Notes for more details and upgrade instructions, and enjoy the new features!

We are excited that this release, like our 2024.2 one, continues to add more functionality across the board for all users. For Admins, we added new abilities to verify user credentials and provision users and groups via external IdP sources, additional powerful configuration options, and performance improvements for important API endpoints (User, Groups, Events). For developers, we added an API Client for Python. We also made further UX/usability and customization enhancements, with a revamped UI for log messages and converting several multi-select boxes into dual-select. Using dual-select components across the interface is the goal; they provide a much cleaner UX for our users.

Let’s take a look at some of the highlights of this release.

authentik is an open source Identity Provider that unifies your identity needs into a single platform, replacing Okta, Active Directory, and auth0. Authentik Security is a public benefit company building on top of the open source project.

Since November 2022, authentik has gone from an open source project with one maintainer writing most of the code (me), to having a real business built on top of it—with six full-time team members across the globe. We celebrated the company’s first birthday last year, but I wanted to share some personal reflections from my own journey from maintainer to CTO.

What’s worked​

Standardizing and templatizing (on some things)​

One of the advantages of a greenfield environment is being able to choose my own constellation of tools and workflows to make things as easy and efficient as possible.

You might think that standardizing of any sort is the remit of scale-ups and big corporations with compliance requirements, but the business efficiency and simplicity that comes with it is also a huge bonus for lean startups.

authentik is an open source Identity Provider that unifies your identity needs into a single platform, replacing Okta, Active Directory, and auth0. Authentik Security is a public benefit company building on top of the open source project.

In January of 2024, a well-known open-source maintainer wrote the following message to a contributor: “You copied that function without understanding why it does what it does, and as a result your code IS GARBAGE. AGAIN.”

If you’ve been in open source long enough, you might recognize the tone of Linus Torvalds, creator and lead developer of the Linux kernel. Torvalds’ sometimes cruel messages aren’t rare (there’s a whole subreddit for these rants, after all). But in this case, the target – Google engineer Steven Rostedtstands – stands out.

If we put aside the substance of the disagreement, we can acknowledge that the tone can be intimidating – not so much to Rostedtstands, who can likely handle himself, but to onlookers who are curious about contributing. Not all of open source is like this, of course, but enough of it is like this (or close to this) that exchanges like these can make contributing to open source scarier than it needs to be.

How can a brand new contributor, much less a Google engineer, feel brave enough to contribute?

The initial temptation, for me and probably many open-source fans, is to tell new contributors it’ll all be fine. There are bad parts, we might say, but there are good parts, too. But this approach risks invalidating their fears.

In this article, I’m going to lay out five real reasons why contributing to open source can be scary for new contributors. Alongside those reasons, though, I’m going to provide five practical ways to face the fears and contribute anyway.

authentik is an open source Identity Provider that unifies your identity needs into a single platform, replacing Okta, Active Directory, and auth0. Authentik Security is a public benefit company building on top of the open source project.

We are happy to announce that 2024 is starting off great, with our first release of the year chock full of new features. Take a look at the new features and functionality included in the release, check out the Release Notes for more details and upgrade instructions, and enjoy the new features!

We confess we are possibly the most excited about this release than any in a while, with some new Admin-level capabilities, enhanced functionality for developers (our DX game is heating up!), and some great UX/usability and customization enhancements.

Let’s start with some of the big features, the ones that kept us busy over the holidays and into the new year.

authentik is an open source Identity Provider that unifies your identity needs into a single platform, replacing Okta, Active Directory, and auth0. Authentik Security is a public benefit company building on top of the open source project.

In 2024, Tom Scott and Jynn Nelson, otherwise different people in different worlds, faced very similar problems.

• Tom Scott is a YouTuber who, as of this writing, has gotten nearly 2 billion views across over 700 videos. Nearly 6.5 million people subscribe to Tom Scott’s YouTube channel.
• Jynn Nelson, a senior engineer, is a major maintainer of Rust, an open-source project that 2023 StackOverflow research showed was the most admired language among developers. About 2.2 million people are Rust developers.

In a goodbye video, Scott announced an extended break from his channel, saying, "I am so tired. There's nothing in my life right now except work.”

In a post called the rust project has a burnout problem, Nelson wrote, articulating sentiments across the Rust community, “you want a break, but you have a voice in the back of your head: ‘the project would be worse without you.’”

It’s unfortunate that this comparison makes the best opening to the point of this post: open source developers are much more like content creators than most people tend to assume.

If anything, when you look at the history of the Internet and the history of distributing content online, open source developers might be the original content creators.

By looking at the paths they have both paved and recontextualizing their work within a broader view of the creator economy, we can come to a better understanding of the shared futures of content creators and open source developers.

authentik is an open source Identity Provider that unifies your identity needs into a single platform, replacing Okta, Active Directory, and auth0. Authentik Security is a public benefit company building on top of the open source project.

Last year we shared our (mostly free and open source) security stack, including tooling we use for basic security coverage like visibility, dependency management, penetration testing, and more. Even with these tools set up, there are still activities and practices you need to do routinely and proactively to ensure you’re not at risk.

There are frameworks you can look to (e.g. NIST, OWASP SAMM) but these can be overwhelming if you’re a one-person team or new to security. If you’re coming into 2024 with a fresh resolve to improve your security posture, here’s our advice on what to prioritize (and where you can automate).

authentik is an open source Identity Provider that unifies your identity needs into a single platform, replacing Okta, Active Directory, and auth0. Authentik Security is a public benefit company building on top of the open source project.

A hearty Happy New Year to you all, from all of of us at Authentik Security, with sincere wishes that your 2024 may be filled with a maximum of joys (new features and elegant code) and a minimum of pains (bugs and the dreadful reality of not-enough-time).

The start of a new year makes me want to first say thank you for the past year.