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).

Configuration Reference

This plugin is compatible with requests with the following protocols:

• http
• https
• grpc
• grpcs

This plugin is partially compatible with DB-less mode.

In DB-less mode, you configure Kong Gateway declaratively. Therefore, the Admin API is mostly read-only. The only tasks it can perform are all related to handling the declarative config, including:

• setting a target's health status in the load balancer
• validating configurations against schemas
• uploading the declarative configuration using the /config endpoint

Consumers and Credentials can be created with declarative configuration.

Admin API endpoints which do POST, PUT, PATCH or DELETE on Credentials are not available on DB-less mode.

Enable the plugin on a service

curl -X POST http://{HOST}:8001/services/{SERVICE}/plugins \
    --data "name=basic-auth"  \
    --data "config.hide_credentials=true"

apiVersion: configuration.konghq.com/v1
kind: KongPlugin
metadata:
  name: <basic-auth-example>
config: 
  hide_credentials: true
plugin: basic-auth

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: {SERVICE}
  labels:
    app: {SERVICE}
  annotations:
    konghq.com/plugins: <basic-auth-example>
spec:
  ports:
  - port: 80
    targetPort: 80
    protocol: TCP
    name: {SERVICE}
  selector:
    app: {SERVICE}

plugins:
- name: basic-auth
  service: {SERVICE}
  config: 
    hide_credentials: true

Enable the plugin on a route

$ curl -X POST http://{HOST}:8001/routes/{ROUTE}/plugins \
    --data "name=basic-auth"  \
    --data "config.hide_credentials=true"

apiVersion: configuration.konghq.com/v1
kind: KongPlugin
metadata:
  name: <basic-auth-example>
config: 
  hide_credentials: true
plugin: basic-auth

apiVersion: networking/v1beta1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: {ROUTE}
  annotations:
    kubernetes.io/ingress.class: kong
    konghq.com/plugins: <basic-auth-example>
spec:
  rules:
  - host: examplehostname.com
    http:
      paths:
      - path: /bar
        backend:
          serviceName: echo
          servicePort: 80

plugins:
- name: basic-auth
  route: <route>
  config: 
    hide_credentials: true

Enable the plugin globally

A plugin which is not associated to any service, route, or consumer is considered global, and will be run on every request. Read the Plugin Reference and the Plugin Precedence sections for more information.

$ curl -X POST http://{HOST}:8001/plugins/ \
    --data "name=basic-auth"  \
    --data "config.hide_credentials=true"

apiVersion: configuration.konghq.com/v1
kind: KongClusterPlugin
metadata:
  name: <global-basic-auth>
  annotations:
    kubernetes.io/ingress.class: kong
  labels:
    global: \"true\"
config: 
  hide_credentials: true
plugin: basic-auth

plugins:
- name: basic-auth
  config: 
    hide_credentials: true

Parameters

Here's a list of all the parameters which can be used in this plugin's configuration:

Once applied, any user with a valid credential can access the Service. To restrict usage to only some of the authenticated users, also add the ACL plugin (not covered here) and create allowed or denied groups of users.

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 Gateway
• 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: 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. Use the X-Consumer-ID value to query the Kong Admin API and retrieve more information about the Consumer.

Important: X-Credential-Username was deprecated in favor of X-Credential-Identifier in Kong 2.1.

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.