Daenney's blog

A lot has been written about working remotely. In light of the current COVID-19 pandemic, I decided to write down my own thoughts on this topic and the processes and tools I’ve developed to help me be effective at working remotely. I moved to being full-time remote in February of 2019. Before that every job I’ve had was office bound. Though I worked remotely every now and then, especially when things like the flu hit, I’d never worked from home more than a few consecutive days and never in any permanent capacity.

In a previous post I showed you how to setup Keycloak to provide you with OpenID Connect and SAML capabilities. The problem with Keycloak is is that’s it’s a pretty big beast, whereas most of the time we don’t need all the functionality. It’s also tricky to run in a highly available fashion and is annoyingly slow to start up. In this post we’ll drop Keycloak in favour of Dex, a small OpenID Connect Provider that supports a number of backends including LDAP.

In a previous post I showed you how to set up Gatekeeper as a proxy to enfroce authorization on requests. The problem with Gatekeeper is that it required a lot of additional configuration, an additional proxy hop and is a separate component. What this post will do instead is use the OpenResty build of nginx with the OIDC plugin to avoid all of that. This brings the complexity back down to just running nginx with it acting as a Relaying Party to do authenticaiton and provide authorization information to backends.

Update 2019-06-09: Performing BIOS updates I recently decided to get myself a new laptop. Though work provides me with one, I make a point out of never using it for personal use. It can get a bit complicated around intellectual property laws. I’m also perfectly fine with my employer enforcing certain policies on their device that I just don’t want for my personal devices. For the device itself I decided I wanted a 13" model, with an AMD Ryzen CPU and Radeon graphics.

As part of my home automation I wanted to emulate a Philips Hue bridge. The reason for that is that a lot of things provide out-of-the-box integration with Philips Hue. Aside from that, there’s a ton of apps and other cool things in the Hue ecosystem I wanted to unlock. However, we use the IKEA Trådfri system at home, even though we do have a first generation Philips Hue bridge. The reason for switching to the IKEA one was:

I’m addicted to home automation. There. Said it. But it’s just such a tremendous amount of fun to play with. I’m pretty sure it’s the SRE in me. Why do anything by hand when you can have computers do things for you? Why turn on the lights when you get home when it can happen automatically? Turn on the lights when you enter the bathroom? Barbaric! Turn them off? I’ve git better things to do!

NOTE: A much simpler solution is describe in BeyondCorp @ Home: Authentication and authorization proxy with OpenResty In a previous post I showed you how to set up a “Lite” version of a BeyondCorp style access layer for a home or startup environment. The reason I called it lite is because though it does do full authentication, it didn’t have separate controls for authorization. Meaning if you could authenticate you were authorized, I couldn’t specify that for certain endpoints you have to be part of a specific group or be granted a certain role before you get access.

Update 2019-10-06: If you don’t need SAML, consider swapping out Keycloak for Dex instead. You can read all about that in this follow-up post. BeyondCorp is a different approach to securing access to networked applications and services. Unlike the traditional perimeter security model, BeyondCorp dispels the notion of network segmentation as the primary mechanism for protecting sensitive resources. Instead, all applications are deployed to the public Internet, accessible through a user and device-centric authentication and authorization workflow.

This post is part of a series on directory services. Current available installments are: Introduction Terminology Basic concepts Designing the DIT Setting up an LDAP server Securing your LDAP server Writing and testing ACLs Now that we have a directory service up an running it’s important we talk a bit about some security aspects. The configuration that was generated sets up the LDAP server in such a way that anonymous access is not allowed.

This post is part of a series on directory services. Current available installments are: Introduction Terminology Basic concepts Designing the DIT Setting up an LDAP server Securing your LDAP server Writing and testing ACLs I consider setting up a Directory Service a pretty big pain in the ass, especially OpenLDAP. Microsoft fares much better with Active Directory which is also much more easily configured for folks less familiar with directory services in general.