Securing Unleash v3
This guide is only relevant if you are using Unleash Open-Source. The Enterprise edition does already ship with a secure setup and multiple SSO options.
The Unleash API is split into two different paths: /api/client and /api/admin. This makes it easy to have different authentication strategy for the admin interface and the client-api used by the applications integrating with Unleash.
General settings
Unleash uses an encrypted cookie to maintain a user session. This allows users to be logged in across multiple instances of Unleash. To protect this cookie, Unleash will automatically generate a secure token the first time you start Unleash.
Securing the Admin API
To secure the Admin API, you have to tell Unleash that you are using a custom admin authentication and implement your authentication logic as a preHook.
const unleash = require('unleash-server');
const myCustomAdminAuth = require('./auth-hook');
unleash
.start({
databaseUrl: 'postgres://unleash_user:passord@localhost:5432/unleash',
adminAuthentication: 'custom',
preRouterHook: myCustomAdminAuth,
})
.then((unleash) => {
console.log(
`Unleash started on http://localhost:${unleash.app.get('port')}`,
);
});
Additionally, you can trigger the admin interface to prompt the user to sign in by configuring your middleware to return a 401 status on protected routes. The response body must contain a message and a path used to redirect the user to the proper login route.
{
"message": "You must be logged in to use Unleash",
"path": "/custom/login"
}
Examples of custom authentication hooks:
Securing the Client API
A common way to support client access is to use pre-shared secrets. This can be solved by having clients send a shared key in an HTTP header with every client request to the Unleash API. All official Unleash clients should support this.
In the Java client this would look like this:
UnleashConfig unleashConfig = UnleashConfig.builder()
.appName("my-app")
.instanceId("my-instance-1")
.unleashAPI(unleashAPI)
.customHttpHeader("Authorization", "12312Random")
.build();
On the Unleash server side, you need to implement a preRouter hook which verifies that all calls to /api/client include this pre-shared key in the defined header. This could look something like this.
const unleash = require('unleash-server');
const sharedSecret = '12312Random';
unleash
.start({
databaseUrl: 'postgres://unleash_user:passord@localhost:5432/unleash',
preRouterHook: (app) => {
app.use('/api/client', (req, res, next) => {
if (req.header('authorization') !== sharedSecret) {
res.sendStatus(401);
} else {
next();
}
});
},
})
.then((unleash) => {
console.log(
`Unleash started on http://localhost:${unleash.app.get('port')}`,
);
});