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introducing-metadata-service-authentication.md

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Metadata Service Authentication

Introduction

This document provides a technical overview of the how authentication works in DataHub's backend aimed at developers evaluating or operating DataHub. It includes a characterization of the motivations for the feature, the key components in its design, the new capabilities it provides, & configuration instructions.

Background

Let's recall 2 critical components of DataHub's architecture:

  • DataHub Frontend Proxy (datahub-frontend) - Resource server that routes requests to downstream Metadata Service
  • DataHub Metadata Service (datahub-gms) - Source of truth for storing and serving DataHub Metadata Graph.

Previously, Authentication was exclusively handled by the Frontend Proxy. This service would perform the following steps when a user navigated to http://localhost:9002/:

a. Check for the presence of a special PLAY_SESSION cookie.

b. If cookie was present + valid, redirect to the home page

c. If cookie was invalid, redirect to either a) the DataHub login screen (for JAAS authentication or b) a configured OIDC Identity Provider to perform authentication.

Once authentication had succeeded at the frontend proxy layer, a stateless (token-based) session cookie (PLAY_SESSION) would be set in the users browser. All subsequent requests, including the GraphQL requests issued by the React UI, would be authenticated using this session cookie. Once a request had made it beyond the frontend service layer, it was assumed to have been already authenticated. Hence, there was no native authentication inside of the Metadata Service.

Problems with this approach

The major challenge with this situation is that requests to the backend Metadata Service were completely unauthenticated. There were 2 options for folks who required authentication at the Metadata Service layer:

  1. Set up a proxy in front of Metadata Service that performed authentication
  2. [A more recent possibility] Route requests to Metadata Service through DataHub Frontend Proxy, including the PLAY_SESSION Cookie with every request.

Neither of which are ideal. Setting up a proxy to do authentication takes time & expertise. Extracting and setting a session cookie from the browser for programmatic is clunky & unscalable. On top of that, extending the authentication system was difficult, requiring implementing a new Play module within DataHub Frontend.

Introducing Authentication in DataHub Metadata Service

To address these problems, we introduced configurable Authentication inside the Metadata Service itself, meaning that requests are no longer considered trusted until they are authenticated by the Metadata Service.

Why push Authentication down? In addition to the problems described above, we wanted to plan for a future where Authentication of Kafka-based-writes could be performed in the same manner as Rest writes.

Configuring Metadata Service Authentication

Metadata Service Authentication is currently opt-in. This means that you may continue to use DataHub without Metadata Service Authentication without interruption. To enable Metadata Service Authentication:

  • set the METADATA_SERVICE_AUTH_ENABLED environment variable to "true" for the datahub-gms AND datahub-frontend containers / pods.

OR

  • change the Metadata Service application.yaml configuration file to set authentication.enabled to "true" AND
  • change the Frontend Proxy Service application.config configuration file to set metadataService.auth.enabled to "true"

After setting the configuration flag, simply restart the Metadata Service to start enforcing Authentication.

Once enabled, all requests to the Metadata Service will need to be authenticated; if you're using the default Authenticators that ship with DataHub, this means that all requests will need to present an Access Token in the Authorization Header as follows:

Authorization: Bearer <access-token>

For users logging into the UI, this process will be handled for you. When logging in, a cookie will be set in your browser that internally contains a valid Access Token for the Metadata Service. When browsing the UI, this token will be extracted and sent to the Metadata Service to authenticate each request.

For users who want to access the Metadata Service programmatically, i.e. for running ingestion, the current recommendation is to generate a Personal Access Token (described above) from the root "datahub" user account, and using this token when configuring your Ingestion Recipes. To configure the token for use in ingestion, simply populate the "token" configuration for the datahub-rest sink:

source:
  # source configs
sink:
  type: "datahub-rest"
  config:
    ...
    token: <your-personal-access-token-here!>

Note that ingestion occurring via datahub-kafka sink will continue to be Unauthenticated for now. Soon, we will be introducing support for providing an access token in the event payload itself to authenticate ingestion requests over Kafka.

The Role of DataHub Frontend Proxy Going Forward

With these changes, DataHub Frontend Proxy will continue to play a vital part in the complex dance of Authentication. It will serve as the place where UI-based session authentication originates and will continue to support 3rd Party SSO configuration (OIDC) and JAAS configuration as it does today.

The major improvement is that the Frontend Service will validate credentials provided at UI login time and generate a DataHub Access Token, embedding it into traditional session cookie (which will continue to work).

In summary, DataHub Frontend Service will continue to play a vital role to Authentication. It's scope, however, will likely remain limited to concerns specific to the React UI.

Where to go from here

These changes represent the first milestone in Metadata Service Authentication. They will serve as a foundation upon which we can build new features, prioritized based on Community demand:

  1. Dynamic Authenticator Plugins: Configure + register custom Authenticator implementations, without forking DataHub.
  2. Service Accounts: Create service accounts and generate Access tokens on their behalf.
  3. Kafka Ingestion Authentication: Authenticate ingestion requests coming from the Kafka ingestion sink inside the Metadata Service.
  4. Access Token Management: Ability to view, manage, and revoke access tokens that have been generated. (Currently, access tokens inlcude no server side state, and thus cannot be revoked once granted)

...and more! To advocate for these features or others, reach out on Slack.

Q&As

What if I don't want to use Metadata Service Authentication?

That's perfectly fine, for now. Metadata Service Authentication is disabled by default, only enabled if you provide the environment variable METADATA_SERVICE_AUTH_ENABLED to the datahub-gms container or change the authentication.enabled to "true" inside your DataHub Metadata Service configuration (application.yaml).

That being said, we will be recommending that you enable Authentication for production use cases, to prevent arbitrary actors from ingesting metadata into DataHub.

If I enable Metadata Service Authentication, will ingestion stop working?

If you enable Metadata Service Authentication, you will want to provide a value for the "token" configuration value when using the datahub-rest sink in your Ingestion Recipes. See the Rest Sink Docs for configuration details.

We'd recommend generating a Personal Access Token (described above) from a trusted DataHub Account (e.g. root 'datahub' user) when configuring your Ingestion sources.

Note that you can also provide the "extraHeaders" configuration in datahub-rest sink to specify a custom header to pass with each request. This can be used in conjunction to authenticate using a custom Authenticator, for example.

How do I generate an Access Token for a service account?

There is no formal concept of "service account" or "bot" on DataHub (yet). For now, we recommend you configure any programmatic clients of DataHub to use a Personal Access Token generated from a user with the correct privileges, for example the root "datahub" user account.

I want to authenticate requests using a custom Authenticator? How do I do this?

You can configure DataHub to add your custom Authenticator to the Authentication Chain by changing the application.yaml configuration file for the Metadata Service:

authentication:
  enabled: true # Enable Metadata Service Authentication 
  ....
  authenticators: # Configure an Authenticator Chain 
    - type: <fully-qualified-authenticator-class-name> # E.g. com.linkedin.datahub.authentication.CustomAuthenticator
      configs: # Specific configs that should be passed into 'init' method of Authenticator
        customConfig1: <value>

Notice that you will need to have a class that implements the Authenticator interface with a zero-argument constructor available on the classpath of the Metadata Service java process.

We love contributions! Feel free to raise a PR to contribute an Authenticator back if it's generally useful.

Now that I can make authenticated requests to either DataHub Proxy Service and DataHub Metadata Service, which should I use?

Previously, we were recommending that folks contact the Metadata Service directly when doing things like

  • ingesting Metadata via recipes
  • issuing programmatic requests to the Rest.li APIs
  • issuing programmatic requests to the GraphQL APIs

With these changes, we will be shifting to the recommendation that folks direct all traffic, whether it's programmatic or not, to the DataHub Frontend Proxy, as routing to Metadata Service endpoints is currently available at the path /api/gms. This recommendation is in effort to minimize the exposed surface area of DataHub to make securing, operating, maintaining, and developing the platform simpler.

In practice, this will require migrating Metadata Ingestion Recipes use the datahub-rest sink to pointing at a slightly different host + path.

Example recipe that proxies through DataHub Frontend

source:
  # source configs
sink:
  type: "datahub-rest"
  config:
    ...
    token: <your-personal-access-token-here!>

Feedback / Questions / Concerns

We want to hear from you! For any inquiries, including Feedback, Questions, or Concerns, reach out on Slack!