If you are in the 5%, great! You are probably set already.
If you are not, overreacting isn't going to help anyone. There's no need to start writing user login code tonight.
I think it's worth pointing out that replacing Okta for most people isn't just doing login +MFA stuff.
Sure, there's that part of it - but a lot of the value in going with Okta in particular is that so many third parties support integrating with them in ways that other Identity providers are just not supported.
Account lifecycle stuff (via SCIM) is often limited to just Okta support for products.
There's also the account lifecycle stuff so that HR doesn't have to tell you when they hire someone, they just add them into the HR system and all the things flow out from that. Similarly when someone leaves, you can have those workflows go and disable/delete their accounts.
In fact, a third-party’s “Okta integration” should work out of the box with Keycloak or any other IdP.
[1] 2FA/Time based OTP: https://www.keycloak.org/docs/12.0/server_admin/keycloak-ima...
[2] LDAP/AD (Kerberos) https://dmc.datical.com/z_resources/images/assets/screenshot...
[3] SCIM (third party) https://github.com/Captain-P-Goldfish/scim-for-keycloak
Most of the time I'm talking about SCIM outbound, so provisioning/managing users in some other random service (like Trello, Github, whatever).
That's the major value-add for Okta.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58566587/does-keycloak-s...
So will likely require some changes to Keycloak internals in order to address that reliability issue, which will enable building a reliable interface for your use case.
You will have to find someone to host and patch it, but we shouldn't pretend it's up there with write your own crypto.
Using saas is fine too. Often there cheaper than hiring a person until you need said person anyway, and at that point they're just a single point of failure, and people do underestimate the effort to run a production service well.
But we shouldn't be so anti-intellectual that we pretend that it's the only way to do things, and that well supported foss products don't exist.
This reads to me like you are unfamiliar with keycloak, which is a very mature and capable solution with plenty of support for everything you mention other than SCIM.
Hosting it is not overly challenging, running it in a container would suffice for most companies. Updates are in my experience a smooth process.
I'm not claiming it's as easy as an "auth as a service" platform, but as we see, that comes with its own costs.
So for example if you want to use AWS SSO tied to GSuite, you have to manually manage users, group membership, etc inside AWS SSO.
Similarly for a bunch of other products.
A couple of companies I've worked for now use GSuite as their primary accounts, and while a ton of things authenticate through GSuite (either as a built-in integration, or as SAML) - when you onboard/offboard users it involves going into a bunch of different systems to create/invite, set up group memberships, and then later deactivate accounts.
We're still considering Okta to solve all that workflow stuff. Yes, even after this event.
I believe Okta can also do custom security flows that GSuite can't.
So, if you're on a trusted device+network, then you might not need a 2FA challenge. Or conversely if you're trying to access a sensitive service - then always require a 2FA challenge every X hours.
though that sort of answers a followup Q, it would seem that there would be a market that punts the authentication to gsuite's saml, but automates the user creation and the like on the different services (and deactivation), but one still wouldn't have the "custom flows" as you said.
but if the custom flows aren't that important, I'd rather trust google to handle my authentication than okta, and in my pseudo-okta without authentication scenario, even access to my pseudo-okta would authenticate via google.
Okta is a security company, and due to a well-organized, well-funded attacker, they were able to be breached. If a similar attacker is trying to breach you, you're likely going to get breached.
I think the logic here is accepting that if an attacker is trying to breach you, you’re likely going to get breached. But, if an attacker is trying to breach someone else, you’re still safe(-ish). With a centralized service, you don’t have to be the target to feel the effect.
At small company sizes, where dedicated security team or an admin with sufficient expertise to do proper setup is unaffordable, risk of Okta breach is lower than risk of automated custom setup breach. When you are big enough to deploy self-hosted solution and maintain it for reasonable cost, then yes, I would agree with you, self-hosted setup may reduce risks. When does that happen? When your company has over 1000 people (to break even with your Okta spending) or when your revenue per employee is high enough to spend every year 200-300k€ just on security.
That said, I would think Keycloak would fall under IT in many orgs. So you need a security org mature enough to have trained IT to the point where they can successfully run something this sensitive and security can have confidence in everything around it.
At a guess, that's not before you have 15-20 people in the security org. Probably something like: alerting and incident response (i.e., ops) is 3-5, vendor management 2-3, governance/audit 2-3, security engineering 3-5, security architecture 2-3, management 2-3, privacy 1-2. Run something like this for a year or two and see how the business as a whole shapes up.
As you say, it's a cost question. At what point does running your own IdP become the most valuable thing your company could do with a given chunk of money? One of the perks of a vendor is that the contract comes with liability. How much is that worth to the company?
Your company isn't delegating any operations away? Not even support? If they are, what level of access do those people have? Are the internal services they have access to as secure as your perimeter?
Even if they aren't, the attack can come through any internal employee, and your least security conscious person is your weakest link. Again, what do they have access to? Will they be able to use them to move laterally? Spear phishing from an internal employee to another employee is really, really effective.
BTW Keycloak.current has tossed JBoss & friends for Quarkus. In any case, it's been a remarkably safe product over the years.
Proxyshell and similar recent issues have shown “near-instant compromise” to be the current state of affairs. Most instances are attacked within hours or even days before a vulnerability is disclosed publicly and hits the news.
It also makes user lifecycle someone else's problem. Very important. As a medium and larger sized company, when you have to tell your customers your homegrown IAM was pwned, you're in for a world of hurt. When you're just in the boat with everyone else who got popped, it's an easily recoverable incident.
It doesn't really matter who runs your auth service, if the auth service getting pwned results in a reportable attack, you're in for a world of hurt.
The next step is to articulate why this isn't your fault and that you did everything you reasonbly could have done to not get pwned.
Do you have evidence to support you did your due dilligance on your provider?
Wait, what exactly makes this problem so fundamentally hard?
What stops someone from just releasing a software system that solves the authentication infrastructure problem in a general way (e.g. as Kubernetes did for cloud orchestration)?
Kubernetes doesn’t go after it, either; it complicates your system so exponentially that it drives the same lie. All Kubernetes does is assign a workload to a machine and hook crap up to it. That problem was solved in the 1960s by systems that don’t take multiple FTEs just to operate itself. When you look at Kubernetes in this light there’s a moment of clarity waiting regarding why it exists in the first place, and why it will never in a millennium replace Borg.
In 2010, I joined a social media startup. I was the only operations employee on the team of nine who had ever touched an actual server with my hands. We’re on the third or fourth generation of systems people now who’ve never heard anything except the cloud-native drum and how they’ll never be qualified to run their fingers along the faceplate of the computers running their business. paxys is sharing a derivative of that because it is a strongly held industry belief and a safe language to speak in this market. It just doesn’t make it true, and that’s a powerful realization, but that’s not something most people are ready to hear and truly understand.
You’re asking the absolutely right questions. You’re just asking an industry that gave up on itself so long ago that kids born after UTAH2000 can vote now.
If you mean that a single codebase could be an attractive target for attacks, it's still not a problem since the Free Software community loves having a dozen of competing implementations of the same thing just for the sake of it :)
And this isn't even solved by having standard protocols, open source implementations as you mentioned -- only mitigated. OpenSSL was exploited too.
If "LAPSUS$" is after big companies with significant IP they can hold ransom for millions of dollars, it's most likely not even worth their time to find let alone attack your small company's on-prem SSO even if it was a single shell command away, so you'd still be more secure.
I agree. That being said, there's no need to write login code yourself. Trust on the existing, tested, proven OSS solutions and libraries available, if you decide to not rely on a provider like Okta.
Can you recommend some?
I've also heard good things about Hydra: https://www.ory.sh/hydra/
Depending on your needs, an SSO proxy like Vouch works well for internal services: https://github.com/vouch/vouch-proxy
There's also an abundance of libraries for different programming languages to implement authentication or authorisation, lots of them battle-tested by thousands of services. It's not like providing secure services is impossible without Okta.