Using Keycloak Identity Provider for Rancher SSO

November 13, 2019November 14, 2019 stephen IAM, Integration, Keycloak

In Rancher 2.1.0 they added support for SAML authentication with Keycloak. What this means is Rancher will use a Keycloak realm to authenticate users.

This means that there is one place to manage users for a host of your applications. It also means that if they have logged on to the realm with their browser they can have single sign on to rancher – ie. they will already be logged into rancher.

The documentation on Rancher setting up Keycloak auth is already pretty good, however certain things can get tricky espescially if you are using Keycloak 7 and up.

So let’s jump in and set it up…

Prerequisites

A Keycloak Identity Provider Setup
A Rancher Instance

Setting up the Rancher Client on Keycloak

In keycloak you already have a realm and user’s eith local or federated from LDAP.

So now we need to create the client for Rancher.

Go to Clients -> Create:

Now add the following extra settings (replace the white box with your Rancher URL):

Boom, we’ve setup the keycloak side. Now we just need to export this config to load onto the rancher side.

Usually this would be done on the Installation tab of the client. However rancher wants the SAML Metadata IDPSSODescriptor but Keycloak 7 does not provide that.

The way to get it is to go to this URL:


https://{KEYCLOAK-URL}/auth/realms/{REALM-NAME}/protocol/saml/descriptor

and save that XML to a file.

You then need to copy all the properties of EntitiesDescriptor and add them to the first EntityDescriptor. Then delete the EntitiesDescriptor element.

Now save that and it will be the config to import.

Setting up Keycloak Auth on Rancher

Open Rancher on the Global scope and select Security -> Authentication:

You will get a few authentication / identity provider options:

Select Keycloak and you will need the following information.

Field	Description
Display Name Field	The AD attribute that contains the display name of users.
User Name Field	The AD attribute that contains the user name/given name.
UID Field	An AD attribute that is unique to every user.
Groups Field	Make entries for managing group memberships.
Rancher API Host	The URL for your Rancher Server.
Private Key / Certificate	A key/certificate pair to create a secure shell between Rancher and your IdP.
IDP-metadata	The `metadata.xml` file that you exported from your IdP server.

These AD Attributes are set on the Keycloak side at Client -> Mappers, the best thing to do is add builtin on the rancher side:

That will add the defualt attributes and it is best to add those, however for access to the groups of the user you need to map a group list attribute.

You would use the protocol mapper below, to map the member attribute on rancher side to a user’s group list.

So to view the SAML attribute name just open one of the mappers and use the Friendly Name.

In my case:

Display Name Field: givenName

User Name Field: email

UID Field: email

Rancher API Host: https://yourRancherHostURL:5443

Groups Field: member

If successful you will be presented with this screen. If you are not successful and you have the invalid SAML attributes error, then you need to fix your attribute names.

If you only want to allow members of certain groups on the keycloak realm then you can change the options below:

So How has Our Lives Improved Since Implementing SSO

A central place for authentication, you don’t need to manage much about auth on your application side.
Deletage auth and turn Time-based One Time Pin, Add terms and conditions and giving access with a simple button switch.
You get SSO (single sign on): sign on to the realm and now you can simply press the login button on any other linked client and you will be logged in.
Single sign off – I tested this and it did not work. Logging out of one client kept you in the other client.

Single Sign Out

During my testing single sign out was not working. However I must mention my setup was 3 parts:

Keycloak on a VM accessible only on the local network
A Django App in a docker container on my local machine
Rancher also accessible on the local network

So my guess is that when using the front channel (browser) for the authentication step on the django client, it works because the redirect from the client goes to the docker container.

However when the logout is sent on the backchannel, it can’t access 0.0.0.0:8000 as there isn’t a proper DNS entry.

What I am going to do is deploy the docker container on Openshift (god bless my soul)…and set an ip or dns so that keycloak can access it on the back channel.

Sources

OpenID Connect Clients for Python

November 4, 2019November 4, 2019 stephen IAM

What OpenID Connect clients are available for python?

If we look at the certified implementations for python:

However I also found this one:

Mozilla Django OIDC

The Mozilla one has nicer docs and a nicer readme, so I’m going to start with that. They also have some info on OpenID Connect and seem to know what they are doing. Also I’m using Django So it will plug right in.

Note: django-oidc-provider is not a client – it is a provider. If you are already using an identity provider like Keycloak or WSO2, you don’t need this.

Take a full look at all available django oidc clients on django packages.

Provider Side Configuration

On the provider side you need to create a client and set the relevant settings.

Ensure the access type is confidential so that you can set the required settings on django side:OIDC_RP_CLIENT_ID and OIDC_RP_CLIENT_SECRET

The next thing you need is the settings for keycloaks endpoints, luckily you can easily get it from a url:

http://<MY-KEYCLOAK0IP>/auth/realms/<my-realm-here>/.well-known/openid-configuration

So you can now set these values:


OIDC_OP_AUTHORIZATION_ENDPOINT = ""
OIDC_OP_TOKEN_ENDPOINT = ""
OIDC_OP_USER_ENDPOINT = ""

The default algorithm is HS256 on the mozilla side.

self.OIDC_RP_SIGN_ALGO = self.get_settings('OIDC_RP_SIGN_ALGO', 'HS256')

If you don’t change that you will get a Suspiscious error:

Oh also you don’t need to put OIDC_RP_IDP_SIGN_KEY in your settings, the library will figure that out for you.

Sources

Alpine Python Docker Base image problem with gcc

November 4, 2019November 4, 2019 stephen Containerisation, Containers

An important thing to do with process based containers or any container is to keep them slim and ensure that only what is necessary is packaged into the image.

For that reason I went with the python:3.8-alpine base image. After all was said and done the size of the resulting image was 208MB.

No GCC in that Base Image

Although I needed another python package and this package needed gcc, as shown by this error message in the build process:


    running build_ext
    building 'Cryptodome.Hash._MD2' extension
    creating build/temp.linux-x86_64-3.8
    creating build/temp.linux-x86_64-3.8/src
    gcc -Wno-unused-result -Wsign-compare -DNDEBUG -g -fwrapv -O3 -Wall -DTHREAD_STACK_SIZE=0x100000 -fPIC -DPYCRYPTO_LITTLE_ENDIAN -DSYS_BITS=64 -DLTC_NO_ASM -Isrc/ -I/usr/local/include/python3.8 -c src/MD2.c -o build/temp.linux-x86_64-3.8/src/MD2.o
    unable to execute 'gcc': No such file or directory
    error: command 'gcc' failed with exit status 1

The Wasteful Solution

There is an easy way to fix this problem…use a base image that has gcc prepackaged. I used python:3.8 and it just worked.

However that came at a price, the image was now 1.12GB in size.

So I looked around and it seemed ok to just install gcc with apk.

The Ideal Solution

I reverted back to using python:3.8-alpine and installed gcc and my dependencies in one line:


RUN apk add --no-cache --virtual .build-deps gcc musl-dev \
    && pip install --no-cache-dir -r /code/requirements.txt \
    && apk del .build-deps

Now the image built correctly and the size was 301MB

The ideal solution might not even be this though, as there is the suggestion of multi-stage builds. A Docker image just to build the project and a seperate image just to run.

Batteries Included

I think it comes down to batteries included or not.

I’m also not a fan of having too many commands in your dockerfile, it feels too sysadminy.

But use you descretion – horses for courses.