OAuth support

[girish]

OpenID is great as well if apps support it. IIRC, it specifies the routes and fields that one has to return so it's more standardized.

[fbartels]

Hi @will,

SAML is basically "old tech". It's XML based and requires clients to generate keys through openssl which makes it in my experience both complex and difficult to set up for novice admins and also implement for developers. Apart from that SAML only works for browser based workflows.

Like I said before the one thing SAML has going for it is that its already well supported in enterprise applications. But I recently had a chat with someone involved in quite some university and government projects on the infrastructure side and he told me that he sees a trend to favour oidc over SAML recently.

An article with a comparison can be found at https://spin.atomicobject.com/2016/05/30/openid-oauth-saml/

PS: with Kopano Meet there is actually already an OpenID Connect provider present on Cloudron as all authentication is done through OIDC in it. What we use there is Go and React, but I am confident that there is code to be reused for Node as well.

[will]

@fbartels Thanks for the thoughtful reply!

[iamthefij]

It would seem that supporting Keycloak would be a great way to still only really have to maintain LDAP on the Cloudron side and then add support for OpenID Connect, OAuth 2.0
and SAML 2.0.

I've never set up Keycloak though, so I can't speak to it's ease of use or maintaining, but it is often recommended when people talk about FOSS Identity and Access Management tools.

[girish]

keycloak is a really good idea, didn't think about that. By which, i mean if we could have apps that provide additional saml/oidc support to cloudron, that is definitely way better than us re-inventing all this. Some of the universities Cloudron is deployed in uses Shibboleth which I am told support LDAP and OAuth2

[jk]

I've wished for OAuth support for quite a few times already to support SSO to non-Cloudron apps. So in that case, Cloudron would serve as the identity provider for a third-party app. Kind of like Login with Cloudron.

That would require that one can register third party apps with their client id, client secret and callback URL though.

I have a little bit of experience with Keycloak. I know that U=using Keycloak would (also) support this use case, provided a Cloudron user has access to the Keycload administration interface.

[iamthefij]

@jk That actually used to be possible, but the OAuth provider is now gone.

Adding something like Keycloak or even Shibboleth would add back an OAuth provider.

[Lonkle]

I know it's gonna be a long time away from adding a replacement to OAuth, but are there any alternatives that stand out now more than they did before. Or are we still looking for a solution that doesn't require upstream changes?

[imc67]

@Lonk @nebulon @girish indeed I’m also very curious for this, I think it would make Cloudron even more unique if you could click an app in your Dashboard and you’re “Cloudron-magically” logged in!

[girish]

@imc67 @Lonk Nothing has changed and I don't expect it to either. Without upstream changes to apps, this is not possible. As far as I have noticed, most apps are not adding support for OAuth.

[jdaviescoates]

I note that the lovely people at Indiehosters (all in French) have launched a new service called Liiibre which by default is a nicely integrated Nextcloud, OnlyOffice, Rocket.Chat, and Jitsi Meet.

And I read over on the Meet.coop forum that they are using Keycloak to power their SSO stuff, so that might be worth exploring.

Here is the relevant thread for info:
https://forum.meet.coop/t/hi-from-indiehosters-onboarding-process/343?u=jdaviescoates

But see especially this post:
https://forum.meet.coop/t/hi-from-indiehosters-onboarding-process/343/8?u=jdaviescoates

Edit: and looking back up the thread I see Keycloak has already been proposed/ discussed above too.

[Lonkle]

In summary, I am going to list all alternatives to OAuth that have been listed in this thread:

• OpenID Connect
• SAML
• OAuth2 (a Sign in with Cloudron feature of some kind I think)
• Liiibre
• Keycloak

Did I miss any of them?

[marcusquinn]

@Lonk Gluu perhaps?

[jdaviescoates]

@Lonk said in OAuth support:

• Liiibre
• Keycloak

Liiibre is not an alternative to OAuth, it's the name of a service provided by Indiehosters, which uses Keycloak for SSO.

[Lonkle]

Redoing the list. Thank you guys for your feedback:

• OpenID Connect
• SAML
• OAuth2 (a Sign in with Cloudron feature of some kind I think)
• Keycloak
• Gluu

Did I miss any others anyone can think of? Not thinking of trying to integrate this anytime soon, just want to talk about what's the future to be prepared for it.

[jdaviescoates]

@Lonk said in OAuth support:

• OAuth2 (a Sign in with Cloudron feature of some kind I think)

I'm pretty sure OAuth2 is just version two of OAuth aka OAuth 2.0

https://oauth.net/2/

[Lonkle]

@jdaviescoates said in OAuth support:

@Lonk said in OAuth support:

• OAuth2 (a Sign in with Cloudron feature of some kind I think)

I'm pretty sure OAuth2 is just version two of OAuth aka OAuth 2.0

https://oauth.net/2/

It'd added because it's one of the alternative solutions suggested in the comments, the "Sign in with Cloudron" suggestion would most likely be based on it and I was listing protocols. I can't remember who suggested it and I'm not voting for it but I thought it deserved to be included with the list the community came up with. What do you think?

[mehdi]

Guys, this discussion is moot.

The devs have already said that support for SSO is not happening in Cloudron until way more apps support it upstream, and it does not look like it's headed that way on the apps side.

Like they said, Cloudron used to support SSO with OAuth2, but almost no app used it, so they removed it. They're not gonna implement other SSO protocols in cloudron when app support is also just as bad.

[Lonkle]

@mehdi Well, that’s why I kept this conversation going. To see if it was pointless. I know that anything would need widespread app support upstream adoption and I was curious which ones winning the race, if anyone knew. Maybe none of them are.

[nebulon]

Btw OAuth3 is around the corner and as far as I understood it wont help much in the mess OAuth generally has caused.

All OAuth versions are structurally not well suited for a use-case like Cloudron. The issue is, that they have a central auth authority in mind (google, facebook, ...) where on Cloudron each Cloudron is its own authority, which leads to even more issues within app support. So this is one reason which led us to simply not pursuing this further.

To give more insight into our decision: LDAP won thus far. It has drawbacks (lack of 2fa and real SSO) but generally works well also with the applications UI flows and is by far the most supported and standardized one.