Basic Authentication

Add Basic Authentication to a Service or a Route with username and password protection. The plugin checks for valid credentials in the Proxy-Authorization and Authorization headers (in that order).

Usage

To use the plugin, you first need to create a Consumer to associate one or more credentials to. The Consumer represents a developer or an application consuming the upstream service.

Create a Consumer

You need to associate a credential to an existing Consumer object. A Consumer can have many credentials.

curl -d "username={USER123}&custom_id={SOME_CUSTOM_ID}" http://kong:8001/consumers/

consumers:
- username: {USER123}
  custom_id: {SOME_CUSTOM_ID}

Consumer parameters:

If you are also using the ACL plugin and allow lists with this service, you must add the new consumer to the allowed group. See ACL: Associating Consumers for details.

Create a Credential

curl -X POST http://kong:8001/consumers/{CONSUMER}/basic-auth \
  --data "username=Aladdin" \
  --data "password=OpenSesame"

basicauth_credentials:
- consumer: {CONSUMER}
  username: Aladdin
  password: OpenSesame

Consumer credential parameters:

Using the Credential

The authorization header must be base64 encoded. For example, if the credential uses Aladdin as the username and OpenSesame as the password, then the field’s value is the base64-encoding of Aladdin:OpenSesame, or QWxhZGRpbjpPcGVuU2VzYW1l.

The Authorization (or Proxy-Authorization) header must appear as:

Authorization: Basic QWxhZGRpbjpPcGVuU2VzYW1l

Make a request with the header:

curl http://kong:8000/{PATH_MATCHING_CONFIGURED_ROUTE} \
  -H 'Authorization: Basic QWxhZGRpbjpPcGVuU2VzYW1l'

gRPC clients are supported too:

grpcurl -H 'Authorization: Basic QWxhZGRpbjpPcGVuU2VzYW1l' ...

Upstream Headers

When a client has been authenticated, the plugin appends some headers to the request before proxying it to the upstream service, so that you can identify the consumer in your code:

• X-Consumer-ID: The ID of the consumer in Kong.
• X-Consumer-Custom-ID: The custom_id of the consumer (if set).
• X-Consumer-Username: The username of the consumer (if set).
• X-Credential-Identifier: The identifier of the credential (only if the consumer is not the anonymous consumer).
• X-Anonymous-Consumer: Is set to true if authentication fails, and the anonymous consumer is set instead.

You can use this information on your side to implement additional logic. You can use the X-Consumer-ID value to query the Kong Admin API and retrieve more information about the consumer.

Paginate through the basic-auth Credentials

You can paginate through the basic-auth Credentials for all Consumers using the following request:

curl -X GET http://kong:8001/basic-auths

{
    "total": 3,
    "data": [
        {
            "created_at": 1511379926000,
            "id": "805520f6-842b-419f-8a12-d1de8a30b29f",
            "password": "37b1af03d3860acf40bd9c681aa3ef3f543e49fe",
            "username": "baz",
            "consumer": { "id": "5e52251c-54b9-4c10-9605-b9b499aedb47" }
        },
        {
            "created_at": 1511379863000,
            "id": "8edfe5c7-3151-4d92-971f-3faa5e6c5d7e",
            "password": "451b06c564a06ce60874d0ea2f542fa8ed26317e",
            "username": "foo",
            "consumer": { "id": "89a41fef-3b40-4bb0-b5af-33da57a7ffcf" }
        },
        {
            "created_at": 1511379877000,
            "id": "f11cb0ea-eacf-4a6b-baea-a0e0b519a990",
            "password": "451b06c564a06ce60874d0ea2f542fa8ed26317e",
            "username": "foobar",
            "consumer": { "id": "89a41fef-3b40-4bb0-b5af-33da57a7ffcf" }
        }
    ]
}

You can filter the list by Consumer with the following endpoint:

curl -X GET http://kong:8001/consumers/{USERNAME_OR_ID}/basic-auth

{
    "total": 1,
    "data": [
        {
            "created_at": 1511379863000,
            "id": "8edfe5c7-3151-4d92-971f-3faa5e6c5d7e",
            "password": "451b06c564a06ce60874d0ea2f542fa8ed26317e",
            "username": "foo",
            "consumer": { "id": "89a41fef-3b40-4bb0-b5af-33da57a7ffcf" }
        }
    ]
}

username or id: The username or id of the consumer whose credentials need to be listed.

Retrieve the Consumer associated with a Credential

It is possible to retrieve a Consumer associated with a basic-auth Credential using the following request:

curl -X GET http://kong:8001/basic-auths/{USERNAME_OR_ID}/consumer

{
   "created_at":1507936639000,
   "username":"foo",
   "id":"c0d92ba9-8306-482a-b60d-0cfdd2f0e880"
}

username or id: The id or username property of the basic-auth Credential for which to get the associated Consumer. Note that the username accepted here is not the username property of a Consumer.