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Andrew Minkin
Andrew Minkin

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Secure microservices with Kong and Ory

#microservices #zerotrust #zerotrustnetworks #ory

Microservice architecture is nowadays almost a standard for backend development. An API gateway is an excellent way to connect a group of microservices to a single API accessible to users. API gateways are available from cloud providers such as AWS/Azure/Google Cloud Platform and Cloudflare. Kong is a scalable API gateway built on open source and as such can be an excellent alternative if you don't want to have your system locked in to a particular vendor.

This tutorial shows an example using Kong API gateway,
Ory Kratos, and Ory Oathkeeper.
The illustration below shows you the final architecture we are going to build in this guid

Kong with Ory Products

The full source code for this tutorial is available on
github

What we will use

  • Kong gateway can be an excellent solution for an ingress load balancer and API gateway if you do not want vendor lock-in of any cloud API Gateways in your application. Kong uses OpenResty and Lua. OpenResty extends Nginx with Lua scripting to use Nginx's event model for non-blocking I/O with HTTP clients and remote backends like PostgreSQL, Memcached, and Redis. OpenResty is not an Nginx fork, and Kong is not an Openresty fork. Kong uses OpenResty to enable API gateway features.
  • Oathkeeper acts like an identity and access proxy for our microservices. It allows to proxy only authenticated requests to our microservices, and so we don't need to implement a middleware to check authentication. It can also transform requests, for example convert session auth into JWT for a back-end service.
  • Kratos is the authentication provider; it handles all first-party authentication flows: username/password, forgot password, MFA/2FA, and more. It also provides OIDC/social login capabilities for example "Login with GitHub".

Building simple microservices

Let's say we have two microservices: hello and world. They are pretty simple and serve only to test our API gateway, but you can switch them out for more complex components.

The "World" microservice exposes a /world API endpoint and returns a simple JSON message:

package main import ( "encoding/json" "log" "net/http" ) type Response struct { Message string `json:"message"` } func helloJSON(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) { response := Response{Message: "World microservice"} w.Header().Set("Content-type", "application/json") w.WriteHeader(http.StatusOK) json.NewEncoder(w).Encode(response) } func main() { http.HandleFunc("/world", helloJSON) log.Fatal(http.ListenAndServe(":8090", nil)) }
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The "Hello" microservice exposes a /hello API endpoint and returns a simple JSON message:

package main import ( "encoding/json" "log" "net/http" ) type Response struct { Message string `json:"message"` } func helloJSON(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) { response := Response{Message: "Hello microservice"} w.Header().Set("Content-type", "application/json") w.WriteHeader(http.StatusOK) json.NewEncoder(w).Encode(response) } func main() { http.HandleFunc("/hello", helloJSON) log.Fatal(http.ListenAndServe(":8090", nil)) }
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We now want to secure the access to these microservices and let only authenticated users access these endpoints.

Gopher at work
Okay. Let's start hacking, shall we?

Ory Kratos setup

Follow the Quickstart guide to set up Ory Kratos. In this tutorial you only need a docker-compose file with the following configuration:

 postgres-kratos: image: postgres:9.6 ports: - "5432:5432" environment: - POSTGRES_USER=kratos - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=secret - POSTGRES_DB=kratos networks: - intranet kratos-migrate: image: oryd/kratos:v0.8.0-alpha.3 links: - postgres-kratos:postgres-kratos environment: - DSN=postgres://kratos:secret@postgres-kratos:5432/kratos?sslmode=disable&max_conns=20&max_idle_conns=4 networks: - intranet volumes: - type: bind source: ./kratos target: /etc/config/kratos command: -c /etc/config/kratos/kratos.yml migrate sql -e --yes kratos: image: oryd/kratos:v0.8.0-alpha.3 links: - postgres-kratos:postgres-kratos environment: - DSN=postgres://kratos:secret@postgres-kratos:5432/kratos?sslmode=disable&max_conns=20&max_idle_conns=4 ports: - '4433:4433' - '4434:4434' volumes: - type: bind source: ./kratos target: /etc/config/kratos networks: - intranet command: serve -c /etc/config/kratos/kratos.yml --dev --watch-courier kratos-selfservice-ui-node: image: oryd/kratos-selfservice-ui-node:v0.8.0-alpha.3 environment: - KRATOS_PUBLIC_URL=http://kratos:4433/ - KRATOS_BROWSER_URL=http://127.0.0.1:4433/ networks: - intranet ports: - "4455:3000" restart: on-failure mailslurper: image: oryd/mailslurper:latest-smtps ports: - '4436:4436' - '4437:4437' networks: - intranet
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Some notes on the network architecture:

  • HTTP :4433 and :4434 are the public and admin API's of Ory Kratos.
  • HTTP :4436 for Mailslurper - a mock Email server. You can get an activation link by accessing http://127.0.0.1:4436.
  • HTTP :4455 for the UI interface that allows one to start sign-up/login/recovery flows.

After running docker-compose up you can open http://127.0.0.1:4455/welcome to test your configuration.

Configuring Ory Oathkeeper

Now we can start configuring our gateways for this example. Kong is the entry point for the network traffic. Ory Oathkeeper would be accessible from the internal network only in this case. Let's review our architecture diagram from
before:

Kong with Ory Products

Oathkeeper checks sessions and proxies traffic to our microservice while Kong provides ingress load balancing. We can even set up Round-Robin DNS to have a more robust configuration for our service. Here is how we configure the access rules for Ory Oathkeeper:

- id: "api:hello-protected" upstream: preserve_host: true url: "http://hello:8090" match: url: "http://oathkeeper:4455/hello" methods: - GET authenticators: - handler: cookie_session mutators: - handler: noop authorizer: handler: allow errors: - handler: redirect config: to: http://127.0.0.1:4455/login - id: "api:world-protected" upstream: preserve_host: true url: "http://world:8090" match: url: "http://oathkeeper:4455/world" methods: - GET authenticators: - handler: cookie_session mutators: - handler: noop authorizer: handler: allow errors: - handler: redirect config: to: http://127.0.0.1:4455/login
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The Ory Oathkeeper configuration:

log: level: debug format: json serve: proxy: cors: enabled: true allowed_origins: - "*" allowed_methods: - POST - GET - PUT - PATCH - DELETE allowed_headers: - Authorization - Content-Type exposed_headers: - Content-Type allow_credentials: true debug: true errors: fallback: - json handlers: redirect: enabled: true config: to: http://127.0.0.1:4455/login when: - error: - unauthorized - forbidden request: header: accept: - text/html json: enabled: true config: verbose: true access_rules: matching_strategy: glob repositories: - file:///etc/config/oathkeeper/access-rules.yml authenticators: anonymous: enabled: true config: subject: guest cookie_session: enabled: true config: check_session_url: http://kratos:4433/sessions/whoami preserve_path: true extra_from: "@this" subject_from: "identity.id" only: - ory_kratos_session noop: enabled: true authorizers: allow: enabled: true mutators: noop: enabled: true
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Ory Oathkeeper now looks up a valid session in the request cookies, and proxies only authenticated requests. It redirects to login UI if there's no ory_kratos_session cookie available.

Adding Kong

Now all that is needed is to configure Kong:

services: kong-migrations: image: "kong:latest" command: kong migrations bootstrap depends_on: - db environment: <<: *kong-env networks: - intranet restart: on-failure kong: platform: linux/arm64 image: "kong:latest" environment: <<: *kong-env KONG_ADMIN_ACCESS_LOG: /dev/stdout KONG_ADMIN_ERROR_LOG: /dev/stderr KONG_PROXY_LISTEN: "${KONG_PROXY_LISTEN:-0.0.0.0:8000}" KONG_ADMIN_LISTEN: "${KONG_ADMIN_LISTEN:-0.0.0.0:8001}" KONG_PROXY_ACCESS_LOG: /dev/stdout KONG_PROXY_ERROR_LOG: /dev/stderr KONG_PREFIX: ${KONG_PREFIX:-/var/run/kong} KONG_DECLARATIVE_CONFIG: "/opt/kong/kong.yaml" networks: - intranet ports: # The following two environment variables default to an insecure value (0.0.0.0) # according to the CIS Security test. - "${KONG_INBOUND_PROXY_LISTEN:-0.0.0.0}:8000:8000/tcp" - "${KONG_INBOUND_SSL_PROXY_LISTEN:-0.0.0.0}:8443:8443/tcp" - "127.0.0.1:8001:8001/tcp" - "127.0.0.1:8444:8444/tcp" healthcheck: test: ["CMD", "kong", "health"] interval: 10s timeout: 10s retries: 10 restart: on-failure:5 read_only: true volumes: - kong_prefix_vol:${KONG_PREFIX:-/var/run/kong} - kong_tmp_vol:/tmp - ./config:/opt/kong security_opt: - no-new-privileges db: image: postgres:9.6 environment: POSTGRES_DB: kong POSTGRES_USER: kong POSTGRES_PASSWORD: kong healthcheck: test: ["CMD", "pg_isready", "-U", "kong"] interval: 30s timeout: 30s retries: 3 restart: on-failure networks: - intranet hello:
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The docker-compose creates three containers

  • db container with PostgreSQL database to store the configuration of services/routes for our API gateway.
  • kong-migrate to run migrations against the database.
  • kong container that exposes 8000 port for proxying traffic and 8001 port with admin API.

As last step, we need to create a service for Kong and configure routes.

#!/bin/bash # Creates an secure-api service # and proxies network traffic to oathkeeper curl -i -X POST \ --url http://localhost:8001/services/ \ --data 'name=secure-api' \ --data 'url=http://oathkeeper:4455' # Creates routes for secure-api service curl -i -X POST \ --url http://localhost:8001/services/secure-api/routes \ --data 'paths[]=/'\
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Testing

You can open http://127.0.0.1:8000/hello or zttp://127.0.0.1:8000/world in your browser and there are two possible scenarios:

Further steps

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