# Authelia
[][MIT License]
[](https://travis-ci.org/clems4ever/authelia)
[](https://gitter.im/authelia/general?utm_source=share-link&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=share-link)
**Authelia** is a complete HTTP 2-factor authentication server for proxies like
nginx. It has been made to work with nginx [auth_request] module and is currently
used in production to secure internal services in a small docker swarm cluster.
# Table of Contents
1. [Features summary](#features-summary)
2. [Deployment](#deployment)
1. [With NPM](#with-npm)
2. [With Docker](#with-docker)
3. [Getting started](#getting-started)
1. [Pre-requisites](#pre-requisites)
2. [Run it!](#run-it)
4. [Features in details](#features-in-details)
1. [First factor with LDAP and ACL](#first-factor-with-ldap-and-acl)
2. [Second factor with TOTP](#second-factor-with-totp)
3. [Second factor with U2F security keys](#second-factor-with-u2f-security-keys)
4. [Password reset](#password-reset)
5. [Access control](#access-control)
6. [Single factor authentication](#single-factor-authentication)
7. [Session management with Redis](#session-management-with-redis)
4. [Security](#security)
5. [Documentation](#documentation)
1. [Authelia configuration](#authelia-configuration)
2. [API documentation](#api-documentation)
6. [Contributing to Authelia](#contributing-to-authelia)
7. [License](#license)
---
## Features summary
* Two-factor authentication using either
**[TOTP] - Time-Base One Time password -** or **[U2F] - Universal 2-Factor -**
as 2nd factor.
* Password reset with identity verification using email.
* Single and two factors authentication methods available.
* Access restriction after too many authentication attempts.
* User-defined access control per subdomain and resource.
* Support of [basic authentication] for endpoints protected by single factor.
* High-availability using a highly-available distributed database and KV store.
## Deployment
If you don't have any LDAP and/or nginx setup yet, I advise you to follow the
[Getting Started](#Getting-started) section. That way, you can test it right away
without even configuring anything.
Otherwise, here are the available steps to deploy **Authelia** on your machine given
your configuration file is **/path/to/your/config.yml**. Note that you can create your
own the configuration file from [config.template.yml] at the root of the repo.
### With NPM
npm install -g authelia
authelia /path/to/your/config.yml
### With Docker
docker pull clems4ever/authelia
docker run -v /path/to/your/config.yml:/etc/authelia/config.yml -v /path/to/data/dir:/var/lib/authelia clems4ever/authelia
where **/path/to/data/dir** is the directory where all user data will be stored.
## Getting started
The provided example is docker-based so that you can deploy and test it very
quickly.
### Pre-requisites
#### npm
Make sure you have npm and node installed on your computer.
#### Docker
Make sure you have **docker** and **docker-compose** installed on your machine.
For your information, here are the versions that have been used for testing:
docker --version
gave *Docker version 17.03.1-ce, build c6d412e*.
docker-compose --version
gave *docker-compose version 1.14.0, build c7bdf9e*.
#### Available port
Make sure you don't have anything listening on port 8080 (webserver) and 8085 (webmail).
#### Subdomain aliases
Add the following lines to your **/etc/hosts** to alias multiple subdomains so that nginx can redirect request to the correct virtual host.
127.0.0.1 home.example.com
127.0.0.1 public.example.com
127.0.0.1 dev.example.com
127.0.0.1 admin.example.com
127.0.0.1 mx1.mail.example.com
127.0.0.1 mx2.mail.example.com
127.0.0.1 single_factor.example.com
127.0.0.1 login.example.com
### Run it!
Deploy the **Authelia** example with one of the following commands:
Build Docker container from current commit:
./scripts/build-dev.sh
./scripts/example-commit/deploy-example.sh
Use provided container on [DockerHub](https://hub.docker.com/r/clems4ever/authelia/):
./scripts/example-dockerhub/deploy-example.sh
After few seconds the services should be running and you should be able to visit
[https://home.example.com:8080/](https://home.example.com:8080/).
When accessing the login page, a self-signed certificate exception should appear,
it has to be trusted before you can get to the target page. The certificate
must also be trusted for each subdomain, therefore it is normal to see the exception
several times.
Below is what the login page looks like:
## Features in details
### First factor using an LDAP server
**Authelia** uses an LDAP server as the backend for storing credentials.
When authentication is needed, the user is redirected to the login page which
corresponds to the first factor. Authelia tries to bind the username and password
against the configured LDAP backend.
You can find an example of the configuration of the LDAP backend in [config.template.yml].
### Second factor with TOTP
In **Authelia**, you can register a per user TOTP (Time-Based One Time Password) secret before
authenticating. To do that, you need to click on the register button. It will
send a link to the user email address stored in LDAP. Since this is an example, the email is sent
to a fake email address you can access from the webmail at [http://localhost:8085](http://localhost:8085).
Click on **Continue** and you'll get your secret in QRCode and Base32 formats. You can use
[Google Authenticator]
to store them and get the generated tokens with the app.
**Note:** If you're testing with **npm**, you will not have access to the fake webmail. You can use the filesystem notifier (option available [config.template.yml]) that will create a file containing the validation URL instead of sending an email. Please only use it for testing.
### Second factor with U2F security keys
**Authelia** also offers authentication using U2F (Universal 2-Factor) devices like [Yubikey](Yubikey)
USB security keys. U2F is one of the most secure authentication protocol and is
already available for Google, Facebook, Github accounts and more.
Like TOTP, U2F requires you register your security key before authenticating.
To do so, click on the register button. This will send a link to the
user email address. Since this is an example, the email is sent
to a fake email address you can access from the webmail at [http://localhost:8085](http://localhost:8085).
Click on **Continue** and you'll be asking to touch the token of your device
to register. Upon successful registration, you can authenticate using your U2F
device by simply touching the token. Easy, right?!
**Note:** If you're testing with **npm**, you will not have access to the fake webmail. You can use the filesystem notifier (option available [config.template.yml]) that will create a file containing the validation URL instead of sending an email. Please only use it for testing.
### Password reset
With **Authelia**, you can also reset your password in no time. Click on the
**Forgot password?** link in the login page, provide the username of the user requiring
a password reset and **Authelia** will send an email with an link to the user
email address. For the sake of the example, the email is delivered in a fake webmail deployed
for you and accessible at [http://localhost:8085](http://localhost:8085).
Paste the link in your browser and you should be able to reset the password.
**Note:** If you're testing with **npm**, you will not have access to the fake webmail. You can use the filesystem notifier (option available [config.template.yml]) that will create a file containing the validation URL instead of sending an email. Please only use it for testing.
### Access Control
With **Authelia**, you can define your own access control rules for finely restricting
user access to some resources and subdomains. Those rules are defined and fully documented
in the configuration file. They can apply to users, groups or everyone.
Check out [config.template.yml] to see how they are defined.
### Single factor authentication
Authelia allows you to customize the authentication method to use for each
sub-domain.The supported methods are either "single_factor" or "two_factor".
Please see [config.template.yml] to see an example of configuration.
It is also possible to use [basic authentication] to access a resource
protected by a single factor.
### Session management with Redis
When your users authenticate against Authelia, sessions are stored in a Redis key/value store. You can specify your own Redis instance in [config.template.yml].
## Security
### Protection against cookie theft
Authelia uses two mechanism to protect against cookie theft:
1. session attribute `httpOnly` set to true make client-side code unable to
read the cookie.
2. session attribute `secure` ensure the cookie will never be sent over an
unsecure HTTP connections.
### Protection against multi-domain cookie attacks
Since Authelia uses multi-domain cookies to perform single sign-on, an
attacker who poisonned a user's DNS cache can easily retrieve the user's
cookies by making the user send a request to one of the attacker's IPs.
To mitigate this risk, it's advisable to only use HTTPS connections with valid
certificates and enforce it with HTTP Strict Transport Security ([HSTS]) so
that the attacker must also require the certificate to retrieve the cookies.
Note that using [HSTS] has consequences. That's why you should read the blog
post nginx has written on [HSTS].
### More protections measures
You can also apply the following headers to your nginx configuration for
improving security. Please read the documentation of those headers before
applying them blindly.
```
# We don't want any credentials / TOTP secret key / QR code to be cached by
# the client
add_header Cache-Control "no-store";
add_header Pragma "no-cache";
# Clickjacking / XSS protection
# We don't want Authelia's login page to be rendered within a ,
#