26 posts tagged with "open source"

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.

Many of the high-profile security breaches of the 2010s involved hackers gaining access to username and password pairs. Before multi-factor authentication (MFA) was commonplace, these breaches effectively gave bad actors the keys to the kingdom, since people tend to reuse passwords across platforms and there was no second line of defense against attacks.

Today we have a lot more options for additional authentication steps, which we’ll explore below, while also taking a look at the choices we have made for 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.

Our first release of the new year, version 2025.2, includes something for everyone, with the addition of a major new provider (Shared Signals Framework), authentication checks for "impossible travel" using our GeoIP policy, and Remote Access Control now available as an open source feature! Let's take a closer look at the 2025.2 release.

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

We're making some updates to our open source and enterprise features and support. These changes allow us to scale with the demand we're seeing for authentik—both open source and enterprise—and maintain our commitment to open source as a Public Benefit Company.

TL;DR:

• Remote Access Control is free and open source!
• No minimum user counts are required for paid plans
• Ticket-based support is available for paid plans over $1,000
• Enterprise support is available for contracts over $20,000

Read more details below!

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.

Our authentik 2024.12 release is compact, sweet, and packed with great goodies, just like the holidays ought to be!

We decided not to hold on to these new features and wait to release of them early next year; they are too good to keep to ourselves. And we all know that the holidays are the best times for escaping into some new code and functionality.

Let’s unpack the 2024.12 release and take a look.

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

Earlier this year, an open core project rejected a community contribution because it competed with the enterprise edition. A concern people often raise about monetizing open source is misaligned incentives: why would open core companies make the underlying open source project great when it could cannibalize their paid offering? Open core companies do need paying customers, but offering a substandard free product is hardly going to have people lining up to pay.

We’ve talked about alignment on this blog a lot, because we actually think it’s one of our biggest strengths:

• We’ve discussed how open core aligns company and community incentives.
• We argued that SaaS doesn’t actually align vendor and customer success, especially when it comes to identity management.

Today I want to talk about philosophical alignment with our customers and community, and how it benefits us all to have an open core and source-available enterprise version together with a culture that prizes transparency. We can collaborate closely with customers and potential customers, and everyone has greater visibility into how we respond to issues. But first, let’s look at when the open core model can fall flat.

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

We are happy to announce that our 2024.10 release is ready, and it’s full of great new features and functionality. This release showcases a good balance of additional security hardening and improved usability with faster, smoother workflows.

Every Identity provider and SSO product should be constantly increasing the security and robustness of the code base and new features, and we think it is also important to continuously and explicitly look for ways to enhance our users’ experience and efficiency.

Release 2024.10 includes these major security features: Chrome Device Trust support, JSON Web Encryption, and enhanced CAPTCHA processing. Further highlights of the release include the ability to configure auto-selected 2FA devices, a new task-based structure for our Tech Docs, and a new highly customizable Invalidation flow that can be configured to prompt with multiple logout and redirect options.

This release highlights our commitment to delivering flexibility, security, and optimal user experience in every version of authentik. Take a look at the Release Notes for more details, and read on to learn more about the new features.

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

We recently updated our list of upcoming Enterprise features to more accurately reflect the requests we’ve been hearing from our customers and community. One of the changes you may notice: we are no longer spending precious cycles on brainstorming ways to inject AI into our product and user experience.

We had briefly considered ways that “AI” and specifically LLMs might enhance our platform, including an AI-based risk assessment option, as you see below on the left in our previous Enterprise features list. On reflection, we realized we could probably get most of the way to the same outcome with some custom expression templates and a few if statements, begging the question of whether it was worth the effort to pursue at all. So on our current website, you'll no longer see that mention of AI.

We did not want to push a feature just for the sake of being able to say we are AI-powered.

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

As a Public Benefit Company, authentik is dedicated to open source software development and to our community, and to continuously developing, providing, and maintaining secure, stable authentication solutions.

We are pleased to share our first Public Benefit Company (PBC) report with you, our community, our users, our contributors, and everyone who invests their time and effort into open source software for the good of us all.

Read on for details about our chartered commitments, the work we do to support these commitments, and how the results of the report show that we are on the right path.

Public Benefit Companies are a relatively new form of business entity, and are not limited to software companies. Two of the best known PBCs are the clothing brand Patagonia and the ice cream maker Ben & Jerry's. For any PBC the core focus is, of course, providing a benefit to others beyond themselves, as well as operating with transparency, accountability, and purpose.

PBCs (no matter their field or product) must act in the best interests of the community and consciously understand how their actions will affect others. For authentik specifically, we consider our work in the light of benefiting:

• users and community members who implement and rely on our products
• individuals or companies who contributed to or invested in authentik
• the security and stability of broader systems and environments
• the team members of the company

The benefits to us of being a PBC include attracting like-minded developers with the skills to continuously propel the project forward in the community as well as promoting trust from the community in our ongoing responsibility to the open source project.

In the annual or biennial report, PBCs typically provide a description and explanation of how the benefit company provided a general and/or specific public benefit, as well as which actions and methods they used to deliver and maintain the benefit.

Authentik Security’s stated public benefit purpose is to maintain an open-source platform for the benefit of the public.

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