Authentication provider in Kibana

[virgilp (Virgil Palanciuc)]

Kibana code seems to go to great lengths to prevent the creation of a custom authentication provider (via a 3rd party plugin)

• The existing "providers" map is a hard-coded const in code
• Code checks that any used provider actually exists in the const map
• You can't get your hands on the sessionProviderFactory; you can't create another one
• There is an authentication handler, but only one can be registered (and it is registered by the internal security plugin).

Is this something that Elastic wants to prevent third-party developers from doing? What is the reasoning behind that? It's strange since one can do a third-party authentication provider in Elasticsearch, and it works fine... but it seems to be effectively impossible to use it for creating a Kibana session. Not without patching the Kibana source code itself, anyway.

[Brandon_Kobel]

Hey @virgilp, the authentication provider code within Kibana has been going through rather drastic changes in recent versions, and we didn't consider it stable enough to expose to third-party plugins. We're tracking the request to add this in https://github.com/elastic/kibana/issues/18190.

Do you already have a realm written for Elasticsearch? If you can elaborate upon its internal mechanics, we might be able to provide a work-around which wouldn't require a custom authentication provider in Kibana itself.

[virgilp (Virgil Palanciuc)]

The authentication realm in Elastic is fairly basic - it works by reading a signed jwt token from a custom header. Based on the claims there the user is assigned to a special role name and there's a custom role provider that sets permissions based on the role naming convention.