Auth Proxy

auth_proxy provides authentication (local users/LDAP/AD) and authorization
(RBAC) before forwarding requests to an upstream netmaster. It is TLS-only,
and it will only talk to a non-TLS netmaster. Future versions will allow
or potentially require TLS-only communication with netmaster.

auth_proxy also hosts the Contiv UI (see the contiv-ui repo).
The UI is baked into the container and lives at the /ui directory. It is served
from the root of the proxy, e.g., if you run with --listen-address=localhost:10000,
you can see the UI at https://localhost:10000

A custom version of the UI can be bindmounted over the baked-in version. Note that
you need to bind in the /app directory under the contiv-ui repo, not the base
directory (e.g., -v /your/contiv-ui/repo/app:/ui:ro)

Building

Running make will generate a contiv/auth_proxy:devbuild image using the current
code you have checked out and HEAD from the master branch in the contiv-ui repo.

You can also specify a version, e.g., BUILD_VERSION=0.1 make. This will
generate a contiv/auth_proxy:0.1 image using current code you have checked out
and whatever commit is tagged as 0.1 in the contiv-ui repo.

Version Checking

auth_proxy will check the version of the netmaster it’s pointed to at startup.
We require that the major versions are the same and that the minor version of
netmaster is >= the minor version of auth_proxy.

For example, version 1.2.3 of auth_proxy will only talk to a netmaster build
version of 1.x.y where x is >= 2 and y can be anything.

Running Tests

Tests currently run against the contiv/auth_proxy:devbuild image. Make sure you
have built this image before running tests.

Just run make test to run the systemtests and unit tests. The tests are fully
containerized and will spawn everything they require as part of the test run
(note that this does NOT currently include an AD server, and we are still using a
hardcoded one).

There is also a MockServer available in the systemtests
directory which can pretend to be netmaster for the purposes of testing. This
allows us to mock the parts of netmaster we need (mainly that a given endpoint
returns some expected JSON response) without the burden of actually compiling
and running a full netmaster binary and all of its dependencies plus creating
the necessary networks, tenants, etc. to get realistic responses from it.

For a complete e2e setup involving auth_proxy + UI + netmaster, please see
contiv/install.

Local Development

You will need a certificate and key to start auth_proxy. You can run
make generate-certificate to generate a self-signed certificate and key under
./local_certs if you don’t already have them.

To test auth_proxy in isolation, use make run to start it using the compose file.

Architecture Overview

Before anything else, a prospective user must authenticate and get a token.
Authentication requires passing a username and password to the
/api/v1/auth_proxy/login/ endpoint:

login request ---> auth_proxy ---> authentication
                                                \
                                                 local user *or* LDAP / Active Directory
                                                /
<---- token sent to client <---- auth_proxy ----

Subsequent requests must pass this token along in a X-Auth-Token request
header. All non-login requests are simply passed on to the netmaster if
authentication and authorization are both successful.

Example of a full request cycle:

A request for /api/v1/networks/ is sent in with a token in the X-Auth-Token header
The user represented by the token is authenticated against a local DB or LDAP / Active Directory
An authorization check is performed to see if the user is allowed to access the resource in question (networks)
If both authentication and authorization are successful, the request is proxied to netmaster
If the user is not an admin and the endpoint returns data for multiple tenants, the response from netmaster will be filtered to only return what the current user is allowed to see

request w. token ---> auth_proxy ---> authorization ----> request forwarded to netmaster
                                                                                        \
                                                                                         netmaster
                                                                                        /
<----- results filtered based on token and returned to client <----- auth_proxy --------