Authelia: The Innovative Single Sign-On and Two-Factor Authentication Server
Introducing Authelia, an open-source full-featured authentication server available on GitHub that aims to provide a high degree of protection to users' web applications. This innovative project has been designed with the significant purpose of implementing Single Sign-On (SSO) and Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) across applications, enhancing the overall security and user experience.
Project Overview:
The main objective of Authelia is to provide a robust and comprehensive authentication layer for web applications. The problem Authelia aims to solve is the lack of secure and consistent authentication mechanisms across different web applications. By developing a versatile authentication server, the error-prone task of implementing separate authentication protocols for each application is eliminated. The target users for Authelia are organizations and individual developers wishing to enhance the protection of their web applications.
Project Features:
Authelia is packed with state-of-the-art features that ensure user identity protection. It provides Single Sign-On and Two-Factor Authentication capabilities across applications, scalable from a small scale to enterprise environments. Additionally, it supports multiple second-factor methods – such as security keys (Yubikey), mobile applications, and even hardware tokens. It also allows fine-grained access control to applications or even specific URLs, and comes with a comprehensive audit log feature. To illustrate, a corporation could use Authelia to unify and control access to their diverse web-based resources, ensuring all are protected with 2FA and providing detailed logs of all access attempts.
Technology Stack:
Authelia is built using several contemporary technologies to ensure its robustness and performance. Primarily it uses Go, a statically typed compiled language renowned for its simplicity and efficiency, for the backend. For frontend, Authelia uses Node.js along with Vue.js, making the user interface interactive and user friendly. The choice of Docker and Kubernetes as containerization platforms ensures seamless deployment and scalability.
Project Structure and Architecture:
The entire project is neatly organized using the MVC (Model-View-Controller) design. The Go backend functions as the controller while Node.js based frontend manages the view. All persistent data is stored in the PostgreSQL database making up the model. Integration with Nginx, Traefik, and HAProxy along with support for LDAP and file-based user details storage makes Authelia highly adaptable.
