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Authentication and Authorization

Authentication

Figure 1: High-level overview of the authentication flow Figure 1: High-level overview of the authentication flow

Figure 1 shows the general flow of authentication for customer/client access over the internet. This flow is not used for direct communication to AWS resources.

Cognito

AWS offers a service called Cognito which we use here to handle our authentication needs. The flow described here is known as the Authorization Code Grant.

Some clients don't support redirect handling (302 handling) natively or by default. This is a common cause of error/misunderstandings in development.

Cognito has all the necessary forms built-in to use in your login, logout, profile, etc. screens. Styling can be applied to brand all screens.

Settings

  • Make sure to use the User Pool setting in Cognito!
  • Allow with username for login
  • Allow verified e-mail address for login
  • Add attributes to the identity data: phone number, email.
  • Allow openid scope
  • Set the load balancer's scheme to internet facing

Federation

Federation allows for other authentication providers to be hooked up to our systems. A practical example of this is giving the user the option to log in to your system using their google, Facebook, or other social media site login. The use of federation will immediately generate trust in your system with a large portion of potential users.

Support non-federated authentication too. Some people may either trust your site less than the federated authentication provider's (ie. Google). This may make them skeptical. To further support the availability of your own authentication provider, you should consider that users may want to use different passwords for different online services from a security perspective.

Loadbalancer

The design offered here uses the load balancer directly to provide authentication. The HTTPS Listener is used with a set of rules that provide actions for checking the identity of the user requesting the resource. Once this is done we use the load balancers' rule to forward the traffic to the appropriate scaling group. Infrastructure Scaling and Balancing)

Pricing

Though the pricing of Cognito can be found on the pricing list on the AWS website, we would like to clarify one thing. The pricing of Cognito is based on unique users per month. Billing does not go up if a user logs in multiple times per month nor when they perform multiple requests. If a user doesn't log in or register during a month you will not be billed for that user. Please check AWS Cognito pricing for up-to-date information.