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Securing Kong Manager

Kong Manager enables users with Admin accounts to access Kong entities such as Services, Plugins, and Consumers.

The following document summarizes Kong Manager’s controls for authentication and authorization.

Configuring Authentication

Kong Gateway comes packaged with Authentication Plugins that can be used to secure Kong Manager. Unlike enabling a Plugin on an entity or cluster, enabling an Authentication Plugin for only Kong Manager requires turning on enforce_rbac, setting admin_gui_auth to the desired type, proper configuration of admin_gui_session_conf, and configuring admin_gui_auth_conf if needed.

Kong Manager currently supports the following Authentication Plugins:

In addition to the Authentication Plugins above, the new Sessions Plugin is now required when RBAC is enabled. It sends HTTP cookies to authenticate client requests and maintain session information.

The Sessions Plugin requires a secret and is configured securely by default.

Under all circumstances, the secret must be manually set to a string.
If using HTTP instead of HTTPS, cookie_secure must be manually set to false.
If using different domains for the Admin API and Kong Manager, cookie_samesite must be set to off. Learn more about these properties in Session Security in Kong Manager, and see example configurations.

Access Control with Roles and Workspaces

An Admin belongs to a Workspace and should have at least one Role with a set of Permissions. If an Admin is in a Workspace without a Role, they will not have the ability to see or interact with anything.

By creating separate Workspaces, an organization with multiple teams can segment its Kong cluster so that different teams do not have access to each other’s Kong entities.

Kong Gateway implements Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). Admins are assigned Roles that have clearly defined Permissions. A Super Admin has the ability to:

Further customize Permissions
Create entirely new Roles
Invite or deactivate Admins
Assign or revoke their Roles

In Kong Manager, limiting Permissions also restricts the visibility of the application interface and navigation. Learn more about RBAC in Kong Manager in our guide RBAC in Kong Manager.