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.

With great power (to choose your own tools) comes great responsibility. Not inheriting a legacy toolchain is an infrastructure engineer’s dream, but it can be hard to know where to start.

As the first infrastructure engineer hired to work on authentik, I saw the greenfield opportunities, but also the responsibility and long-term importance of choosing the best stack of tools and build processes. From my past roles, I already knew many of the considerations we would need to factor in.

For example, we know that ease of maintenance is a primary consideration, as is the stability and probable longevity of the tool, how well the tools integrate, and of course the level of support we were likely to get for each tool.

In this post we share some of what we are using to build authentik, and the lessons behind those choices.

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.

On November 29th, 2023, Okta revealed that a breach they announced in October was much worse than originally conveyed. The number of impacted users went from less than 1% of customers to every single customer who had every opened a Support ticket in the Okta Help Center.

So the impact leapt from 134 users to 18,400 users.

We wrote in October about Okta’s poor response to breaches (see Okta got breached again), but since our blog doesn’t seem to be changing Okta’s behaviour, let’s take a closer look at the new revelations from Okta about what happened back in October, how it is impacting users now, and why Okta is still dealing with it in December.

Now all of Okta’s customers are paying the price… with increased phishing and spam.

Our take is that any company can be hacked, but it is the response that matters. How quick is the response, how transparent are the details, how forthright are the acknowledgments? Okta’s initial announcement about the October breach (remember the HAR file that contained a session token?) was less-than-timely, devoid of details, and titled with one of the worst titles ever given such a serious announcement.

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.

Automation plays a large and increasingly important role in cybersecurity. Cybersecurity vendors promote their Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence products as the inevitable future. However, thanks to the work of security experts like Bruce Schneier, we have more insight into the human adversaries that create the underlying risks to network security, and a better understanding of why teaching humans to have a security mindset is the critical first step to keeping your network safe.

The best response to these malicious actors is to think like a security expert and develop the security mindset.

In this blog post, we examine why automation is such a popular solution to cybersecurity problems—from vulnerability scanning to risk assessments. Then, we will look at those tasks in which security automation by itself proves inadequate, with particular focus on automatic scanning. Next, we make a positive case for why the human factor will always be needed in security. Finally, we will propose that good security isn't a feature. It's a proactive security mindset that's required—one with a human element at its core.

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.

There was an article recently about nearly 20 well-known startups’ first 10 hires—security engineers didn’t feature at all. Our third hire at Authentik Security was a security engineer so we might be biased, but even startups without the resources for a full-time security hire should have someone on your founding team wearing the security hat, so you get started on the right foot.

As security departments are cost centers (not revenue generators) it’s not unusual for startups to take a tightwad mentality with security. The good news is that you don’t need a big budget to have a good security posture. There are plenty of free and open source tools at your disposal, and a lot of what makes good security is actually organizational practices—many of which don’t cost a thing to implement.

We estimate that using mostly non-commercial security tools saves us approximately $100,000 annually, and the end-result is a robust stack of security tools and processes.

Here’s how we built out our security stack and processes using mostly free and open source software (FOSS).

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.

Buzzwords are the scourge of the tech industry – reviled by developers, pushed by vendors, and commanded by executives.

All too often, a buzzword is the first signal of rain (or worse): Marketers have created a trend; vendors are using the trend to explain why you need to buy their software right now; executives are worried about a problem they didn’t know existed before they read that Gartner report; and the downpour rains on developers.

“Implement zero trust!”

“Why aren’t we shifting left?”

“Are we resilient? Well, can we get more resilient?”

After a while, buzzwords start to look like trojan horses, and the invading army feels like a swarm of tasks that will result in little reward or recognition. It’s tempting to retreat to cynicism and to ignore every Term™ that comes your way.

But this can be risky. For better or worse, good ideas inevitably get branded, and if you want to keep up, you need to see past the branding – even if it involves stripping away the marketing fluff to see the nugget of an idea within.

There’s no better example of this than zero trust. In this post, we’ll briefly explore the term's history, explain how it became such an untrustworthy buzzword, and argue that thanks to a few advancements (mainly Wireguard), zero trust will soon go from buzzword to reality.

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.

IPv6 addresses have been commercially available since 2010. Yet, after Google’s IPv6 rollout the following year, the adoption by System Administrators and security engineers responsible for an entire organization’s network has been slower than you might expect. Population size and the plethora of work and personal devices that accompany this large number of workers do not accurately predict which countries have deployed this protocol.

In this blog post, I explain briefly what IP addresses are and how they work; share why at Authentik Security we went full IPv6 in May 2023; and then set out some reasons why you should switch now.

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.

Even though we are shouting Happy Birthday to Us, we want to start by saying:

Thank You to you all, our users and supporters and contributors, our questioners and testers!

We simply would not be here, celebrating our 1-year mark, without your past and present support. While there are only 7 employees at Authentik Security, we know that our flagship product, authentik, has a much bigger team... you all! Our contributors and fellow builders and users are on the same team that took us this far, and we look forward to continuing the journey with you to build our amazing authentication platform on authentik!

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.

There are two ways to judge an application:

1. Does it do what it’s supposed to do?
2. Is it easy to run?

This post is about the second.

Using containers is not a best practice in itself. As an infrastructure engineer by background, I’m pretty opinionated about how to set up containers properly. Doing things the “right” way makes things easier not just for you, but for your users as well.

Below are some common mistakes that I see beginners make with containers:

1. Using one container per application
2. Installing things at runtime
3. Writing logs to files instead of stdout

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.

Another security breach for Okta​

Late last week, on October 20, Okta publicly shared that they had experienced a security breach. Fortunately, the damage was limited. However, the incident highlights not only how incredibly vigilant vendors (especially huge vendors of security solutions!) must be, but also how risky the careless following of seemingly reasonable requests can be.

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.

Let’s say you’re working at a small startup: You’re the CTO, your CEO is a good friend, and you have a couple of developers working with you from a previous company. You’re building your initial tech stack, and you start – where else? – with GitHub.

The pricing is simple enough. There’s a pretty feature-rich free plan, but you’re willing to pay up because the Team plan includes features for restricting access to particular branches and protecting secrets.

But the enterprise plan, the plan that costs more than four times as much per user per month – the plan that seems targeted at, well, enterprises – promises “Security, compliance, and flexible deployment.”

Is security… not for startups?

The feature comparison bears this out: Only the enterprise plan offers single-sign-on (SSO) functionality as part of the package – a feature that security experts have long agreed is essential. But don’t get mad at GitHub.

Do you want Box? You’ll have to pay twice as much for external two-factor authentication.

Do you want Mailtrap? The team, premium, and business plans won’t do. Only the enterprise plan, which costs more than $300 per month more than the team plan, offers SSO.

Do you want Hubspot’s marketing product, but with SSO? Prepare to pay $2,800 more per month than the next cheapest plan.

And these are only a few examples. SSO.tax, a website started by Rob Chahin, gathers many more. If you look through, you’ll see companies like SurveyMonkey and Webflow even restrict SSO to enterprise plans with a Contact Us option instead of a price.