Handling Authentication and Authorization in Microservices Part 2

// generates H2HToken valid for 10 mints to be used by microservices. However, I’d appreciate it very much to hear if the following will suffice or I may include more layers to secure the architecture. Cons Slightly more code for developers to write, as they have to focus on permission control. Since authorization is controlled by the respective microservice there’s no network latency and it will be faster. High-level recommendations to logging subsystem architecture with its rationales are listed below.

If you’re wondering where, this UserService come from, then I should say, I’ve created a package to use it in other microservices, so you can do the same or just create a service and use it in your microservices or etc. Pros Different authentication mechanisms can be implemented for each microservice. EAS receives an access token (may be e.g. in a cookie, JWT, OAuth2 token) from incoming request. Necessity to train every developer on custom authorization service API and integration, and there’s no open source community to source information from. Consider a typical use case where the user can place an order-to-order service.

Recommendation on how to implement identity propagation¶

Violating the single responsibility principle—microservices are supposed to fulfill only one function. If you add global authentication and authorization logic to microservices, they now perform an additional function, making them less reliable and more difficult to manage. Central dependency—authentication and authorization logic must be handled separately by each microservice. You could use the same code in all microservices, but this requires that all microservices support a specific language or framework.

The example is written in Node.js, but I am confident you can do something similar in any web framework of your choice. Also, please do keep in mind that I have omitted a lot of code and kept a flat structure in order to try to reduce any confusion with unecessary implementation details. I understand that it can be frustrating but I will try to explain in detail what everything is supposed to do.

Microservices Security Cheat Sheet¶

Now i want to login which i should send an API request, and I should think of a solution to send token anytime I need it. Other 5 microservices without any authentication or authorization.

Fortunately, there are a number of best practices to get you on your way — and standardize on a scalable process across teams. For many microservices that use relational databases, authorization checks may be just the filtering of the INNER JOIN in SQL without doing anything more.

Authorization flow overview#

JWTs can also secure communication between services or pass end-user context and data between microservices. As i understand your case you just need to implement identity server instead of manually passing token. One of the key challenges is how to implement authentication and authorization in microservices so that we can manage security and access control. We look into three basic patterns for adding authentication and authorization into microservices and what they imply for our microservice architecture at large. Token is a container and may contain caller ID and its permissions .