LDAP Authentication

Add LDAP Bind Authentication to a Route (or the deprecated API entity) with username and password protection. The plugin will check for valid credentials in the Proxy-Authorization and Authorization header (in this order).

Terminology

• plugin: a plugin executing actions inside Kong before or after a request has been proxied to the upstream API.
• Service: the Kong entity representing an external upstream API or microservice.
• Route: the Kong entity representing a way to map downstream requests to upstream services.
• upstream service: this refers to your own API/service sitting behind Kong, to which client requests are forwarded.
• API: a legacy entity used to represent your upstream services. Deprecated in favor of Services since CE 0.13.0 and EE 0.32.

Configuration

Enabling the plugin on a Route

Configure this plugin on a Route with:

$ curl -X POST http://kong:8001/routes/{route_id}/plugins \
    --data "name=ldap-auth"  \
    --data "config.hide_credentials=true" \
    --data "config.ldap_host=ldap.example.com" \
    --data "config.ldap_port=389" \
    --data "config.start_tls=false" \
    --data "config.base_dn=dc=example,dc=com" \
    --data "config.verify_ldap_host=false" \
    --data "config.attribute=cn" \
    --data "config.cache_ttl=60" \
    --data "config.header_type=ldap"

• route_id: the id of the Route that this plugin configuration will target.

Enabling the plugin on an API

If you are using an older version of Kong with the legacy API entity (deprecated in favor of Services since CE 0.13.0 and EE 0.32.), you can configure this plugin on top of such an API by making the following request:

$ curl -X POST http://kong:8001/apis/{api}/plugins \
    --data "name=ldap-auth"  \
    --data "config.hide_credentials=true" \
    --data "config.ldap_host=ldap.example.com" \
    --data "config.ldap_port=389" \
    --data "config.start_tls=false" \
    --data "config.base_dn=dc=example,dc=com" \
    --data "config.verify_ldap_host=false" \
    --data "config.attribute=cn" \
    --data "config.cache_ttl=60" \
    --data "config.header_type=ldap"

• api: either id or name of the API that this plugin configuration will target.

Global plugins

All plugins can be configured using the http://kong:8001/plugins/ endpoint. A plugin which is not associated to any Service, Route or Consumer (or API, if you are using an older version of Kong) is considered "global", and will be run on every request. Read the Plugin Reference and the Plugin Precedence sections for more information.

Parameters

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

Usage

In order to authenticate the user, client must set credentials in Proxy-Authorization or Authorization header in following format

The plugin will validate the user against the LDAP server and cache the credential for future requests for the duration specified in config.cache_ttl.

Upstream Headers

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

• X-Credential-Username, the username of the Credential (only if the consumer is not the ‘anonymous’ consumer)
• X-Anonymous-Consumer, will be set to true when authentication failed, and the ‘anonymous’ consumer was set instead.
• X-Consumer-ID, the ID of the ‘anonymous’ consumer on Kong (only if authentication failed and ‘anonymous’ was set)
• X-Consumer-Custom-ID, the custom_id of the ‘anonymous’ consumer (only if authentication failed and ‘anonymous’ was set)
• X-Consumer-Username, the username of the ‘anonymous’ consumer (only if authentication failed and ‘anonymous’ was set)