How a small Go binary lets every application speak one language for login while the messy world of identity providers hides behind it.

Welcome to Dex: Federated OpenID Connect for Cloud-Native Identity.

Dex is a CNCF identity service that puts a single OpenID Connect endpoint in front of LDAP, SAML, GitHub, Google, and a dozen other upstream providers, so your applications only ever have to learn one authentication protocol. The problem it solves is fragmentation: real organizations authenticate against many systems at once, and wiring each application directly to each of them is brittle and slow to change. This book begins with that problem and what an identity provider actually is, then walks through the OpenID Connect protocol Dex speaks to its clients, the connector system that translates upstream logins into standard claims, and the pluggable storage that holds tokens and keys. From there it covers the gRPC management API, the canonical Kubernetes single-sign-on use case that made Dex popular, and a closing chapter on running Dex well in production. Throughout, the goal is a working mental model backed by real configuration field names and flows, not hand-waving.

This title is part of the ShriIra library and is free to read in full, right here — our small contribution to making world-class knowledge easy to reach.

A note on reading it: open the Contents menu at the top of the reader to jump between chapters, use the Aa menu to set a comfortable text size, theme (light, sepia, or night), and single- or two-page layout. Your place is saved automatically, so you can always pick up where you left off.

We hope it serves you well.

— Shriira Press

Contents

1. Chapter 1 — The Identity Problem and What Dex Is
2. Chapter 2 — Speaking OpenID Connect
3. Chapter 3 — Connectors: Federating Upstream Providers
4. Chapter 4 — Storage, Tokens, and Signing Keys
5. Chapter 5 — Clients, Scopes, and the gRPC API
6. Chapter 6 — Dex and Kubernetes Single Sign-On
7. Chapter 7 — Running Dex in Practice