Configuring an Authentication Provider

An overview of authentication providers, to help you choose the right one for your environment.

There are two types of providers supported in Knox for establishing a user’s identity:

Authentication Providers
Federation Providers

Authentication providers directly accept a user’s credentials and validates them against some particular user store. Federation providers, on the other hand, validate a token that has been issued for the user by a trusted Identity Provider (IdP).

Authentication Providers

Providers have a name-value based configuration. There are different authentication providers:

Anonymous

Used by Knox to let the proxied service or UI do its own authentication.
LDAP

For LDAP/AD authentication with username and password. No SPNEGO/Kerberos support.
SPNEGO

For SPNEGO/Kerberos authentication with delegation tokens. No LDAP/AD support.
PAM

For PAM authentication with username and password, via ShiroProvider.

Federation Providers

There are different federation providers:

HeaderPreAuth
SSOCookieProvider
JWT
Pac4j