Identity Verification (from your app)

This article describes how to retrieve a user's identity from a Pomerium-managed application. Pomerium uses JSON web tokens (JWT) to attest that a given request was handled by Pomerium's authorization service.

Prerequisites

To secure your app with signed headers, you'll need the following:

An application you want users to connect to.
A JWT library. Only the ES256 signing algorithm is supported.

JWT verification

If a signing key is set, the user's associated identity information will be included in a signed attestation JWT that will be added to each requests's upstream header X-Pomerium-Jwt-Assertion. The signed attestation JWT is also available at the special /.pomerium/jwt endpoint of any URL handled by Pomerium.

You should verify that the JWT contains at least the following claims:

JWT	description
`exp`	Expiration time in seconds since the UNIX epoch. Allow 1 minute for skew.
`iat`	Issued-at time in seconds since the UNIX epoch. Allow 1 minute for skew.
`aud`	The client's final domain e.g. `httpbin.corp.example.com`.
`iss`	Issuer must be the URL of your authentication domain e.g. `authenticate.corp.example`.
`sub`	Subject is the user's id. Can be used instead of the `X-Pomerium-Claim-Sub` header.
`email`	Email is the user's email. Can be used instead of the `X-Pomerium-Claim-Email` header.
`groups`	Groups is the user's groups. Can be used instead of the `X-Pomerium-Claim-Groups` header.

Audience and issuer claims

Pomerium uses the claims provided by the identity provider's JWT to populate the audience and issuer claims in the attestation JWT.

Audience is the URL of the target upstream application. The aud claim defines what application the JWT is intended for.

Issuer is the URL of the authentication domain that issued the JWT. The iss claim tells the target upstream application who the issuing authority is and provides context about the subject.

The attestation JWT's signature can be verified using the public key which can be retrieved at Pomerium's /.well-known/pomerium/jwks.json endpoint which lives on the authenticate service. A jwks_uri is useful when integrating with other systems like istio. For example:

curl https://authenticate.int.example.com/.well-known/pomerium/jwks.json | jq

{
  "keys": [
    {
      "use": "sig",
      "kty": "EC",
      "kid": "ccc5bc9d835ff3c8f7075ed4a7510159cf440fd7bf7b517b5caeb1fa419ee6a1",
      "crv": "P-256",
      "alg": "ES256",
      "x": "QCN7adG2AmIK3UdHJvVJkldsUc6XeBRz83Z4rXX8Va4",
      "y": "PI95b-ary66nrvA55TpaiWADq8b3O1CYIbvjqIHpXCY"
    }
  ]
}

{
  "keys": [
    {
      "use": "sig",
      "kty": "OKP",
      "kid": "3aa847838906f3c930f55c2d5885943ac7bede8f780d388015575334f88e77ef",
      "crv": "Ed25519",
      "alg": "EdDSA",
      "x": "xsg1A67wECXAmRnSib8lSsgatcNcYm7vvspQnocPQNc"
    }
  ]
}

Verification in a Single-Page Application

A single-page javascript application can verify the JWT using a fetch to /.pomerium/jwt and a JWT library like jose.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <script type="module">
      import {
        decodeJwt,
        createRemoteJWKSet,
        jwtVerify,
      } from 'https://cdn.skypack.dev/jose';

      async function main() {
        const result1 = await fetch('/.pomerium/jwt');
        const jwt = await result1.text();
        const claims = decodeJwt(jwt);
        console.log('Unverified Claims:', claims);

        const jwksURL =
          'https://' + claims.iss + '/.well-known/pomerium/jwks.json';
        const jwks = await createRemoteJWKSet(new URL(jwksURL));

        const {payload} = await jwtVerify(jwt, jwks, {
          audience: claims.aud,
          issuer: claims.iss,
        });
        console.log('Verified Claims:', payload);
      }

      main();
    </script>
  </head>
  <body></body>
</html>

Manual verification

Though you will very likely be verifying signed-headers programmatically in your application's middleware, and using a third-party JWT library, if you are new to JWT it may be helpful to show what manual verification looks like.

Provide Pomerium with a base64 encoded Elliptic Curve (NIST P-256 aka secp256r1 aka prime256v1) Private Key. In production, you'd likely want to get these from your KMS.
```
openssl ecparam -genkey -name prime256v1 -noout -out ec_private.pem
openssl ec -in ec_private.pem -pubout -out ec_public.pem
# careful! this will output your private key in terminal
cat ec_private.pem | base64
```
Copy the base64 encoded value of your private key to pomerium-proxy's environmental configuration variable SIGNING_KEY.
```
SIGNING_KEY=ZxqyyIPPX0oWrrOwsxXgl0hHnTx3mBVhQ2kvW1YB4MM=
```
Reload pomerium-proxy. Navigate to httpbin (by default, https://httpbin.corp.${YOUR-DOMAIN}.com), and login as usual. Click request inspection. Select /headers. Click try it out and then execute. You should see something like the following.
X-Pomerium-Jwt-Assertion is the signature value. It's less scary than it looks and basically just a compressed, json blob as described above. Navigate to jwt.io which provides a helpful GUI to manually verify JWT values.
Paste the value of X-Pomerium-Jwt-Assertion header token into the Encoded form. You should notice that the decoded values look much more familiar.
Finally, we want to cryptographically verify the validity of the token. To do this, we will need the signer's public key. You can simply copy and past the output of cat ec_public.pem.

Voila! Hopefully walking through a manual verification has helped give you a better feel for how signed JWT tokens are used as a secondary validation mechanism in pomerium.

caution

In an actual client, you'll want to ensure that all the other claims values are valid (like expiration, issuer, audience and so on) in the context of your application. You'll also want to make sure you have a safe and reliable mechanism for distributing pomerium-proxy's public signing key to client apps (typically, a key management service).

Automatic verification

We currently maintain SDKs for the following languages:

In the future, we will add implementations for:

Python
Java
.NET

Adding Additional Claims

If your IdP passes other claims that you would like to pass to your application, please use jwt-claims-headers to indicate additional claims to be included into the Assertion JWT.

Identity Verification (from your app)

Prerequisites​

JWT verification​

Verification in a Single-Page Application​

Manual verification​

Automatic verification​

Adding Additional Claims​