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91 lines
5.4 KiB
Markdown
91 lines
5.4 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "Threat Model"
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description: "An overview of the Authelia threat model."
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lead: "An overview of the Authelia threat model."
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date: 2022-05-13T12:34:15+10:00
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draft: false
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images: []
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menu:
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overview:
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parent: "security"
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weight: 430
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toc: false
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aliases:
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- /o/threatmodel
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- /docs/security/threat-model.html
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---
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The design goals for Authelia is to protect access to applications by collaborating with reverse proxies to prevent
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attacks coming from the edge of the network. This document gives an overview of what Authelia is protecting against.
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Some of these ideas are expanded on or otherwise described in [Security Measures](measures.md).
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## General assumptions
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Authelia is considered to be running within a trusted network and it heavily relies on the first level of security
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provided by reverse proxies. It's very important that you take time configuring your reverse proxy properly to get all
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the authentication benefits brought by Authelia.
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Some general security tweaks are listed in [Security Measures](measures.md) to give you some ideas.
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## Guarantees
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If properly configured, Authelia guarantees the following for security of your users and your apps:
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* Applications cannot be accessed without proper authorization. The access control list is highly configurable allowing
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administrators to guarantee the least privilege principle.
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* Applications can be protected with two-factor authentication in order to fight against credential theft and protect
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highly sensitive data or operations.
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* Sessions are bound in time, limiting the impact of a cookie theft. Sessions can have both soft and hard expiration
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time limits. With the soft limit, the user is logged out when inactive for a certain period of time. With the hard
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limit, the user has to authenticate again after a certain period of time, whether they were active or not.
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* Brute force attacks against credentials are protected thanks to a regulation mechanism temporarily blocking the user
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account after too many attempts and delays to the authentication process.
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* Identity validation is required for performing administrative actions such as registering 2FA devices, preventing
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attackers to pass two-factor authentication by self-registering their own device. An email with a link is sent to the
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user with a link providing them access to the registration flow which can only be opened by a single session.
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* Prevention against session fixation by regenerating a new session after each privilege elevation.
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* Prevention against LDAP injection by following
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[OWASP recommendations](https://cheatsheetseries.owasp.org/cheatsheets/LDAP_Injection_Prevention_Cheat_Sheet.html)
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regarding valid input characters.
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* Connections between Authelia and third-party components like the SMTP server, database, session cache, and LDAP server
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can be made over TLS to mitigate against man-in-the-middle attacks.
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* Validation of user group memberships gets refreshed regularly from the authentication backend (LDAP only).
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## Potential future guarantees
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* Define and enforce a password policy (to be designed since such a policy can clash with a policy set by the LDAP
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server).
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* Detect credential theft and prevent malicious actions.
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* Detect session cookie theft and prevent malicious actions.
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* Binding session cookies to single IP addresses.
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* Authenticate communication between Authelia and reverse proxy.
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* Securely transmit authentication data to backends (OAuth2 with bearer tokens).
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* Least privilege on LDAP binding operations (currently administrative user is used to bind while it could be anonymous
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for most operations).
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* Extend the check of user group memberships to authentication backends other than LDAP (File currently).
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* Allow administrators to configure policies regarding password resets so a compromised email account does not leave
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accounts vulnerable.
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* Allow users to view their active and past sessions to either destroy them, report malicious activity to the
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administrator, or both.
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* Allow administrators to temporarily restrict users that are suspected of being compromised no matter which backend is
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being used.
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* Log comprehensive information about user sessions so administrators can identify malicious activity and potential
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consequences or damage caused by identified malicious activity.
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* Ensure the `X-Forwarded-*` and `X-Original-*` headers are able to be trusted by allowing configuration of trusted proxy
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servers.
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## Trusted environment
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It's important to note that Authelia is considered running in a trusted environment for two reasons:
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1. Requests coming to Authelia should be initiated by reverse proxies but CAN be initiated by any other server
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currently. There is no trusted relationship between Authelia and the reverse proxy so an attacker within the network
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could abuse Authelia and attack it.
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2. Your environment should be considered trusted especially if you're using the `Remote-User`, `Remote-Name`,
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`Remote-Email` and `Remote-Groups` headers to forward authentication data to your backends. These headers are
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transmitted unsigned to the backends, meaning a malicious user within the network could pretend to be
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Authelia and send those headers to bypass authentication and gain access to the service. This could be mitigated by
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transmitting those headers with a digital signature which could be verified by the backend however, many backends
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just won't support it. It has therefore been decided to invest in OpenID Connect instead to solve that authentication
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delegation problem.
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