Open source platform for X.509 certificate based service authentication and fine grained access control in dynamic infrastructures. Athenz supports provisioning and configuration (centralized authorization) use cases as well as serving/runtime (decentralized authorization) use cases.
Athenz
Athenz is an open source platform for X.509 certificate based service authentication and fine-grained
access control in dynamic infrastructures. It supports provisioning and configuration (centralized
authorization) use cases as well as serving/runtime (decentralized authorization) use cases. Athenz
authorization system utilizes x.509 certificates and industry standard mutual TLS bound oauth2 access
tokens. The name “Athenz” is derived from “AuthNZ” (N for authentication and Z for authorization).
Table of Contents
Background
Athenz is an open source platform for X.509 certificate based service authentication
and fine-grained role based access control in dynamic infrastructures. It provides
support for the following three major functional areas.
Service Authentication
Athenz provides secure identity in the form of short lived X.509 certificate
for every workload or service deployed in private (e.g. Openstack, K8S, Screwdriver)
or public cloud (e.g. AWS EC2, ECS, Fargate, Lambda). Using these X.509 certificates
clients and services establish secure connections and through mutual TLS authentication verify
each other’s identity. The service identity certificates are valid for 30 days only,
and the service identity agents (SIA) part of those frameworks automatically refresh
them daily. The term service within Athenz is more generic than a traditional service.
A service identity could represent a command, job, daemon, workflow, as well as both an
application client, and an application service.
Since Athenz service authentication is based on
X.509 certificates, it is
important that you have a good understanding of what X.509 certificates are
and how they’re used to establish secure connections in Internet protocols
such as TLS.
Role-Based Authorization (RBAC)
Once the client is authenticated with its x.509 certificate, the service
can then check if the given client is authorized to carry out the requested
action. Athenz provides fine-grained role-based access control (RBAC) support
for a centralized management system with support for control-plane access control
decisions and a decentralized enforcement mechanism suitable for data-plane
access control decisions. It also provides a delegated management model that
supports multi-tenant and self-service concepts.
AWS Temporary Credentials Support
When working with AWS, Athenz provides support to access AWS services
from on-prem services with using AWS temporary credentials rather than
static credentials. Athenz ZTS server can be used to request AWS temporary
credentials for configured AWS IAM roles.
Install
- Development Environment
- Local/Development/Production Environment Setup
- AWS Production Environment Setup
Usage
- Architecture
- Features
- Developer Guide
- Customizing Athenz
- User Guide
Contribute
Please refer to the contributing file for information about how to get involved. We welcome issues, questions, and pull requests.
You can also contact us for any user and development discussions through our groups:
- Athenz-Dev for development discussions
- Athenz-Users for users questions
The sourcespy dashboard provides a high level overview of the repository including module dependencies, module hierarchy, external libraries, web services, and other components of the system.
License
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0: http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0