5 posts tagged with "open source"

authentik is an open source Identity Provider that unifies your identity needs into a single platform, replacing Okta, Active Directory, and auth0. Authentik Security is a public benefit company building on top of the open source project.

As a young security company, we’ve been working on our implementation of SCIM (System for Cross-domain Identity Management), which I’ll share more about below. SCIM is in many ways a great improvement on LDAP, but we’ve run into challenges in implementation and some things just seem to be harder than they need to be. Is it just us?

authentik is a unified identity platform that helps with all of your authentication needs, replacing Okta, Active Directory, Auth0, and more. Building on the open-source project, Authentik Security Inc is a public benefit company that provides additional features and dedicated support.

We have provided M2M communication in authentik for the past year, and in this blog we want to share some more information about how it works in authentik, and take a look at three use cases.

What is M2M?​

Broadly speaking, M2M communication is the process by which machines (devices, laptops, servers, smart appliances, or more precisely the client interface of any thing that can be digitally communicated with) exchange data. Machine-to-machine communication is an important component of IoT, the Internet of Things; M2M is how all of the “things” communicate. So M2M is more about the communication between the devices, while IoT is the larger, more complex, overarching technology.

Interestingly, M2M is also implemented as a communication process between business systems, such as banking services, or payroll workflows. One of the first fields to heavily utilize M2M is the oil and gas industry; everything from monitoring the production (volume, pressure, etc.) of gas wells, to tracking fleets of trucks and sea vessels, to the health of pipelines can be done using M2M communication.

Financial systems, analytics, really any work that involves multi-machine data processing, can be optimized using M2M.

“Machine to machine systems are the key to reliable data processing with near to zero errors” (source)

Where there is communication in software systems, there is both authentication and authorization. The basic definition of the terms is that authentication is about assessing and verifying WHO (the person, device, thing) is involved, while authorization is about what access rights that person or device has. So we choose to use the phrase “machine-to-machine communication” in order to capture both of those important aspects.

Or we could use fun terms like AuthN (authentication) and AuthZ (authorization).

So in some ways you can think of M2M as being like an internal API, with data (tokens and keys and certs and all thing access-related) being passed back and forth, but specifically for authentication and authorization processes.

authentik is an open source Identity Provider that unifies your identity needs into a single platform, replacing Okta, Active Directory, and auth0. Authentik Security is a public benefit company building on top of the open source project.

Legacy security vendors that rely on black box development can't keep up with open source. It's an oft-discussed topic—the ability of open source communities to quickly jump in and collectively solve problems and innovate solutions—but it is equally believed that "serious" security software companies have proprietary software.

In this blog, we will take a closer look at the pros and cons of the various source availability types of SSO and other security software.

📣 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.