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by cainlevy 3150 days ago
My intention for the user-facing endpoints is that the host app will never need to see or accidentally log a user's password. It's a pattern inspired by credit card vaults.

Could you still achieve your deployment goals with a Gateway/WAF setup that proxies the user-facing endpoints? The only issue I'm presently aware of with this setup is https://github.com/keratin/authn-server/issues/8.
1 comments
cortesi 3150 days ago
Sure - in my case this would be a load balancer on Google Cloud configured through a Kubernetes ingress. All the public paths available on the Auth microservice would have to be listed explicitly. You have to be very sure in this scenario that only the public URLs are reachable.

I see the motivation for sending user passwords straight to AuthN, but I do wonder if on balance the dangers of correctly configuring a shared public/private service don't outweigh the dangers of relaying the password through your front-end (which has to be able to access private endpoints on the AuthN service anyway). If you really didn't want your front-end to touch passwords, you could have a tiny sidecar service that only exposes the public endpoints and speaks GRPC to AuthN.

Anyway, this is well into debatable "matter of opinion" territory, and I don't want to waste your time. Thanks for publishing AuthN - I'll keep a close watch as you progress.

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