Authenticate requests from Dapr using token authentication

Require every incoming API request from Dapr to include an authentication token

For some building blocks such as pub/sub, service invocation and input bindings, Dapr communicates with an app over HTTP or gRPC. To enable the application to authenticate requests that are arriving from the Dapr sidecar, you can configure Dapr to send an API token as a header (in HTTP requests) or metadata (in gRPC requests).

Create a token

Dapr uses JWT tokens for API authentication.

Note, while Dapr itself is actually not the JWT token issuer in this implementation, being explicit about the use of JWT standard enables federated implementations in the future (e.g. OAuth2).

To configure API authentication, start by generating your token using any JWT token compatible tool (e.g. https://jwt.io/) and your secret.

Note, that secret is only necessary to generate the token, and Dapr doesn’t need to know about or store it

Configure app API token authentication in Dapr

The token authentication configuration is slightly different for either Kubernetes or self-hosted Dapr deployments:

Self-hosted

In self-hosting scenario, Dapr looks for the presence of APP_API_TOKEN environment variable. If that environment variable is set while daprd process launches, Dapr includes the token when calling an app:

export APP_API_TOKEN=<token>

To rotate the configured token, simply set the APP_API_TOKEN environment variable to the new value and restart the daprd process.

Kubernetes

In Kubernetes deployment, Dapr leverages Kubernetes secrets store to hold the JWT token. Start by creating a new secret:

kubectl create secret generic app-api-token --from-literal=token=<token>

Note, the above secret needs to be created in each namespace in which you want to enable app token authentication

To indicate to Dapr to use the token in the secret when sending requests to the app, add an annotation to your Deployment template spec:

annotations:
  dapr.io/enabled: "true"
  dapr.io/app-token-secret: "app-api-token" # name of the Kubernetes secret

When deployed, the Dapr Sidecar Injector automatically creates a secret reference and injects the actual value into APP_API_TOKEN environment variable.

Rotate a token

Self-hosted

To rotate the configured token in self-hosted, simply set the APP_API_TOKEN environment variable to the new value and restart the daprd process.

Kubernetes

To rotate the configured token in Kubernates, update the previously created secret with the new token in each namespace. You can do that using kubectl patch command, but the easiest way to update these in each namespace is by using manifest:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: app-api-token
type: Opaque
data:
  token: <your-new-token>

And then apply it to each namespace:

kubectl apply --file token-secret.yaml --namespace <namespace-name>

To tell Dapr to start using the new token, trigger a rolling upgrade to each one of your deployments:

kubectl rollout restart deployment/<deployment-name> --namespace <namespace-name>

Note, assuming your service is configured with more than one replica, the key rotation process does not result in any downtime.

Authenticating requests from Dapr

Once app token authentication is configured in Dapr, all requests coming from Dapr include the token:

HTTP

In case of HTTP, inspect the incoming request for presence of dapr-api-token parameter in HTTP header:

dapr-api-token: <token>

gRPC

When using gRPC protocol, inspect the incoming calls for the API token on the gRPC metadata:

dapr-api-token[0].

Accessing the token from the app

Kubernetes

In Kubernetes, it’s recommended to mount the secret to your pod as an environment variable. Assuming we created a secret with the name app-api-token to hold the token:

containers:
  - name: mycontainer
    image: myregistry/myapp
    envFrom:
    - secretRef:
      name: app-api-token

Self-hosted

In self-hosted mode, you can set the token as an environment variable for your app:

export APP_API_TOKEN=<my-app-token>

Related Links

• Learn about Dapr security concepts
• Learn HowTo Enable API token authentication in Dapr

Last modified September 17, 2021 : Merge pull request #1757 from georgestevens99/1440SecretKeyRefExplanation (620a5f8)