18 posts tagged with "security"

Access tokens make identity management and authentication relatively painless for our end-users. But, like anything to do with access, tokens also can be fraught with risk and abuse.

The recent announcement from Sourcegraph that their platform had been penetrated by a malicious hacker using a leaked access token is a classic example of this balance of tokens being great… until they are in the wrong hands.

This incident prompts all of us in the software industry to take yet another look at how our security around user identity and access can be best handled, to see if there are lessons to be learned and improvements to be made. These closer looks are not only at how our own software and users utilizes (and protects) access tokens, but also in how such incidents are caught, mitigated, and communicated.

📣 We are happy to announce that the first authentik Enterprise release is here! 🎉

The Enterprise release of authentik provides all of the functionality that we have spent years building in our open source product, plus dedicated support and account management. This Enterprise version is available in Preview mode in our latest release, 2023.8.

This is an exciting step for us, as we grow the team and the company and our user base. We officially became a company just last fall (I wrote about it in November 2022, in “The next step for authentik"), and this release is another move forwards in maturing authentik into the SSO and identity management app of choice.

One thing we want to acknowledge, up front, is that we would never have been able to achieve this goal without the years of support from our open source community. You all helped build authentik into what it is today, and that’s why all of our Enterprise-level features will be open core and source available, always.

There’s been a lot of discussion about licensing in the news, with Red Hat and now Hashicorp notably adjusting their licensing models to be more “business friendly,” and Codecov (proudly, and mistakenly) pronouncing they are now “open source.”

“Like the rest of them, they have redefined ‘Open’ as in ‘Open for business’”—jquast on Hacker News

This is a common tension when you’re building commercially on top of open source, so I wanted to share some reflections from my own experience of going from MIT, to GPL, back to MIT.

Identity – whether we’re talking about internal authentication (think Auth0) or external authentication (think Okta) – has become boring.

Little else proves this better than the fact that Okta and Auth0 are now the same company and that their primary competitor, Microsoft AD, survives based on bundling and momentum. Identity has become a commodity – a component you buy off the shelf, integrate, and ignore.

Of course, taking valuable things for granted isn’t always bad. We might regularly drive on roads we don’t think much about, for example, but that doesn’t make them any less valuable.

The danger with letting identity become boring is that we’re not engaging in the problem and we’re letting defaults drive the conversation rather than context-specific needs. We’re not engaging in the solution because we’re not encouraging a true buy vs. build discussion.

My pitch: Let’s make identity fun again. And in doing so, let’s think through a better way to decide whether to build or buy software.

In scenarios where security is offered as optional, there's an inherent risk. Customers, particularly those with a limited knowledge of digital security, might not fully comprehend its significance or choose to sidestep these features due to budget constraints. However, these seemingly inconsequential choices can expose users to significant risks. Without proper security measures in place, customers can become vulnerable to security breaches, putting their sensitive data at risk.

This situation raises a pressing question: how do we strike a balance in this landscape that is fair to both users and providers? Ensuring user convenience while maintaining robust security measures is complicated. If we lean too heavily towards convenience, we risk compromising on security. Conversely, an overemphasis on stringent security measures may lead to a complex and off-putting user experience.

In today's digital landscape, businesses of all sizes increasingly rely on Software as a Service (SaaS) to streamline their operations and improve overall efficiency. However, as the adoption of SaaS applications continues to rise, so too do the security risks associated with these platforms. This has led to a growing demand for robust enterprise security features and Single Sign-On (SSO) solutions that can effectively safeguard sensitive data and protect businesses from cyber threats. In this blog, we'll delve into the intricacies of enterprise security, explore the benefits of SSO for businesses of all sizes, and examine the role of automation in ensuring robust security. We'll also discuss the importance of building SaaS apps with scalability in mind and highlight Authentik Security’s solution, authentik, as a unified authentication tool to help secure your organization.

In today's digital world, security is a critical aspect of any organization's operations. While some may perceive security as an enterprise-level feature, it is essential for businesses of all sizes to prioritize and implement robust security measures. One of the most common security measures is to implement Single Sign-On (SSO), a digital authentication method that uses a single set of credentials to access multiple applications.

Supply chains, whether for automotive parts or microprocessors, are complex, as we all know from recent history. Modern software, with more components than ever and automated package management, is also complex, and this complexity provides a rich environment for supply chain attacks. Supply chain attacks inject malicious code into an application via the building blocks of the application (for example, dependencies) in order to compromise the app in order to infect multiple users.