Introduction to Kanidm

Kanidm is an identity management server, acting as an authority on account information, authentication and authorisation within a technical environment.

The intent of the Kanidm project is to:

• Provide a single source of truth for authorisation and authentication.
• Make system, network, application and web authentication easy and accessible.
• Secure and reliable by default, aiming for the highest levels of quality and stability.

Why do I want Kanidm?

Whether you work in a business, a volunteer organisation, or are an enthusiast who manages their personal services, you need methods of authenticating and identifying to your systems. These systems also need to determine what authorisation and privileges you have while accessing them.

We've probably all been in workplaces where you end up with multiple accounts on various systems - one for a workstation, different SSH keys for different tasks, maybe some shared account passwords. Not only is it difficult for people to manage all these different credentials and what they have access to, but it also means that sometimes these credentials have more access or privilege than they require. In the worst case this can lead to weak credentials (corpname123 is a common example) or credentials that are disclosed via git repos.

Kanidm solves this problem by acting as a central authority of accounts in your organisation. This allows each account to associate many devices and strong credentials with different privileges. An example of how this looks:

graph LR;
	device@{ shape: circle, label: "Your Device" };

	ssh@{ shape: processes, label: "SSH Servers" };
	website@{ shape: processes, label: "Websites" };
	wifi@{ shape: processes, label: "Wifi / VPN" };
	radius@{ shape: div-rect, label: "RADIUS Server" };

	kanidm@{ shape: lin-cyl, label: "Kanidm" };

	device-- Trusts OAuth -->website;
	website-- Reads User Data -->kanidm;
	device-- OAuth -->kanidm;

	device-- SSH -->ssh;
	ssh-- Retrieve SSH Keys -->kanidm;

	device-- Login to -->wifi;
	wifi-- RADIUS Credentials -->radius;
	radius-- Verifies Credentials -->kanidm;

A key design goal is that you authenticate with your device in some manner, and then your device will continue to authenticate you in the future. Each of these different types of credentials, from SSH keys, application passwords, RADIUS passwords and others, are "things your device knows" or "things your device has". Each credential has limited capability and scope, and can only access that exact service or resource.

This helps improve security; a compromise of the service or the network transmission does not grant you unlimited access to your account and all its privileges. As the credentials are specific to a device, if a device is compromised you can revoke its associated credentials. If a specific service is compromised, only the credentials for that service need to be revoked.

Due to this model, and the design of Kanidm to centre the device and to have more per-service credentials, workflows and automation are added or designed to reduce human handling.

For Developers

Looking for the rustdoc documentation for the libraries themselves? Click here!