mTLS for admin/public interfaces

[aarmam]

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Describe your problem

We would like to have mTLS option for both the admin and public interfaces.

Describe your ideal solution

Introduce configurable ClientAuth and ClientCAs in server handler tls configuration.

Configuration:

serve.public.tls.client_ca: /path/to/file.pem
serve.admin.tls.client_ca: /path/to/file.pem

when specified, then ClientAuth would be set to ClientAuthType.RequireAndVerifyClientCert

Version

2.x

Additional Context

Willing to help implementing it if necessary!

[kmherrmann]

Thanks for filing this @aarmam! @zepatrik I'd love your opinion here as we're working on improvements to API keys and PAKs. Would mTLS be possible to implement in this context?

[zepatrik]

There are many ways to do service authentication. While mTLS definitely is one of the most common, we would like to keep this complexity out of our services and rather recommend to offload this to a sidecar. Hydra would then only listen on localhost and therefore be only available through the sidecar. The complexity comes when you require multiple CAs with different priviledges, need CA rotation, ....

A sidecar approach allows anyone to use any kind of auth, not just mTLS. Does that answer your question @aarmam?

[aeneasr]

I agree with Patrik here - mTLS (termination) should be done in envoy or another ingress proxy. Solving this in Hydra will have a lot of complexity - from different TLS modes to CAs, self signed certs, and so on :)

[alnr]

I think mTLS is a reasonable request. The only difficulty in the implementation would be auto-reloading the client CAs from disk.

[kmherrmann]

@aarmam after internal discussion, we won't be prioritizing mTLS support on our end. We'd be happy to review a PR if you'd like to contribute it though!

[aeneasr]

Before contributing please read through https://github.com/ory/fosite/issues/661 :)

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