hydra

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ORY Hydra is a hardened, certified OAuth2 and OpenID Connect server optimized for low-latency, high throughput, and low resource consumption. ORY Hydra is not an identity provider (user sign up, user log in, password reset flow), but connects to your existing identity provider through a consent app. Implementing the consent app in a different language is easy, and exemplary consent apps (Go, Node) and SDKs are provided.

Besides mitigating various attack vectors, such as database compromisation and OAuth 2.0 weaknesses, ORY Hydra is also able to securely manage JSON Web Keys. Click here to read more about security.

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Table of Contents

• What is ORY Hydra?
  • Who's using it?
  • OAuth2 and OpenID Connect: Open Standards!
  • OpenID Connect Certified
• Quickstart
  • 5 minutes tutorial: Run your very own OAuth2 environment
  • Installation
• Ecosystem
  • ORY Security Console: Administrative User Interface
  • ORY Oathkeeper: Identity & Access Proxy
  • ORY Keto: Access Control Policies as a Server
  • Examples
• Security
  • Disclosing vulnerabilities
• Benchmarks
• Telemetry
• Documentation
  • Guide
  • HTTP API documentation
  • Upgrading and Changelog
  • Command line documentation
  • Develop
• Libraries and third-party projects
• Blog posts & articles

What is ORY Hydra?

ORY Hydra is a server implementation of the OAuth 2.0 authorization framework and the OpenID Connect Core 1.0. Existing OAuth2 implementations usually ship as libraries or SDKs such as node-oauth2-server or fosite, or as fully featured identity solutions with user management and user interfaces, such as Dex.

Implementing and using OAuth2 without understanding the whole specification is challenging and prone to errors, even when SDKs are being used. The primary goal of ORY Hydra is to make OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect 1.0 better accessible.

ORY Hydra implements the flows described in OAuth2 and OpenID Connect 1.0 without forcing you to use a "Hydra User Management" or some template engine or a predefined front-end. Instead it relies on HTTP redirection and cryptographic methods to verify user consent allowing you to use ORY Hydra with any authentication endpoint, be it authboss, User Frosting or your proprietary Java authentication.

Who's using it?

The ORY community stands on the shoulders of individuals, companies, and maintainers. We thank everyone involved - from submitting bug reports and feature requests, to contributing patches, to sponsoring our work. Our community is 1000+ strong and growing rapidly. The ORY stack protects 1.200.000.000+ API requests every month with over 15.000+ active service nodes. Our small but expert team would have never been able to achieve this without each and everyone of you.

The following list represents companies that have accompanied us along the way and that have made outstanding contributions to our ecosystem. If you think that your company deserves a spot here, reach out to hi@ory.sh now!

Please consider giving back by becoming a sponsor of our open source work on Patreon or Open Collective.

Type	Name	Logo	Website
Sponsor	Raspberry PI Foundation	raspberrypi.org
Contributor	Kyma Project	kyma-project.io
Sponsor	ThoughtWorks	thoughtworks.com
Sponsor	Tulip	tulip.com
Sponsor	Cashdeck / All My Funds	cashdeck.com.au
Sponsor	3 Rein	3rein.com (avaiable soon)
Contributor	Hootsuite	hootsuite.com
Adopter *	Segment	segment.com
Adopter *	Arduino	arduino.cc

We also want to thank all individual contributors

as well as all of our backers

and past & current supporters (in alphabetical order) on Patreon: Alexander Alimovs, Billy, Chancy Kennedy, Drozzy, Edwin Trejos, Howard Edidin, Ken Adler Oz Haven, Stefan Hans, TheCrealm.

* Uses one of ORY's major projects in production.

OAuth2 and OpenID Connect: Open Standards!

ORY Hydra implements Open Standards set by the IETF:

• The OAuth 2.0 Authorization Framework
• OAuth 2.0 Threat Model and Security Considerations
• OAuth 2.0 Token Revocation
• OAuth 2.0 Token Introspection
• OAuth 2.0 Dynamic Client Registration Protocol
• OAuth 2.0 Dynamic Client Registration Management Protocol
• OAuth 2.0 for Native Apps
• Proof Key for Code Exchange by OAuth Public Clients

and the OpenID Foundation:

• OpenID Connect Core 1.0
• OpenID Connect Discovery 1.0
• OpenID Connect Dynamic Client Registration 1.0
• OpenID Connect Front-Channel Logout 1.0
• OpenID Connect Back-Channel Logout 1.0

OpenID Connect Certified

ORY Hydra is an OpenID Foundation certified OpenID Provider (OP).

The following OpenID profiles are certified:

• Basic OpenID Provider (response types code)
• Implicit OpenID Provider (response types id_token, id_token+token)
• Hybrid OpenID Provider (response types code+id_token, code+id_token+token, code+token)
• OpenID Provider Publishing Configuration Information
• Dynamic OpenID Provider

To obtain certification, we deployed the reference user login and consent app (unmodified) and ORY Hydra v1.0.0.

Quickstart

This section is a quickstart guide to working with ORY Hydra. In-depth docs are available as well:

• The documentation is available here.
• The REST API documentation is available here.

5 minutes tutorial: Run your very own OAuth2 environment

The tutorial teaches you to set up ORY Hydra, a Postgres instance and an exemplary identity provider written in React using docker compose. It will take you about 5 minutes to complete the tutorial.

Installation

Head over to the ORY Developer Documentation to learn how to install ORY Hydra on Linux, macOS, Windows, and Docker and how to build ORY Hydra from source.

Ecosystem

ORY Security Console: Administrative User Interface

The ORY Security Console is a visual admin interface for managing ORY Hydra, ORY Oathkeeper, and ORY Keto.

ORY Oathkeeper: Identity & Access Proxy

ORY Oathkeeper is a BeyondCorp/Zero Trust Identity & Access Proxy (IAP) built on top of OAuth2 and ORY Hydra.

ORY Keto: Access Control Policies as a Server

ORY Keto is a policy decision point. It uses a set of access control policies, similar to AWS IAM Policies, in order to determine whether a subject (user, application, service, car, ...) is authorized to perform a certain action on a resource.

Examples

The ory/examples repository contains numerous examples of setting up this project individually and together with other services from the ORY Ecosystem.

Security

Why should I use ORY Hydra? It's not that hard to implement two OAuth2 endpoints and there are numerous SDKs out there!

OAuth2 and OAuth2 related specifications are over 400 written pages. Implementing OAuth2 is easy, getting it right is hard. ORY Hydra is trusted by companies all around the world, has a vibrant community and faces millions of requests in production each day. Of course, we also compiled a security guide with more details on cryptography and security concepts. Read the security guide now.

Disclosing vulnerabilities

If you think you found a security vulnerability, please refrain from posting it publicly on the forums, the chat, or GitHub and send us an email to hi@ory.am instead.

Benchmarks

Our continuous integration runs a collection of benchmarks against ORY Hydra. You can find the results here.

Telemetry

Our services collect summarized, anonymized data which can optionally be turned off. Click here to learn more.

Documentation

Guide

The Guide is available here.

HTTP API documentation

The HTTP API is documented here.

Upgrading and Changelog

New releases might introduce breaking changes. To help you identify and incorporate those changes, we document these changes in UPGRADE.md and CHANGELOG.md.

Command line documentation

Run hydra -h or hydra help.

Develop

Developing with ORY Hydra is as easy as:

go get -d -u github.com/ory/hydra
cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/ory/hydra
make init
export GO111MODULE=on
## With database
make test
## Without database
make quicktest

Then run it with in-memory database:

DSN=memory go run main.go serve all

Notes

• We changed organization name from ory-am to ory. In order to keep backwards compatibility, we did not rename Go packages.
• You can ignore warnings similar to package github.com/ory/hydra/cmd/server: case-insensitive import collision: "github.com/sirupsen/logrus" and "github.com/sirupsen/logrus".

Libraries and third-party projects

Official:

• User Login & Consent Example

Community:

• Kubernetes helm chart
• Werther - an Identity Provider over LDAP

⚠ Outdated Community Projects: The following projects are outdated and won't work anymore in most cases. Having said that they still might help you to better understand how to integrate HYDRA and solve specific cases.

• ORY Hydra middleware for Gin
• Consent App SDK for Go

Blog posts & articles

• Creating an oauth2 custom lamda authorizer for use with Amazons (AWS) API Gateway using Hydra
• Warning, ORY Hydra has changed almost everything since writing this article: Hydra: Run your own Identity and Access Management service in <5 Minutes

Documentation

Overview

Package main ORY Hydra

Welcome to the ORY Hydra HTTP API documentation. You will find documentation for all HTTP APIs here.

Schemes: http, https
Host:
BasePath: /
Version: latest

Consumes:
- application/json
- application/x-www-form-urlencoded

Produces:
- application/json

SecurityDefinitions:
oauth2:
    type: oauth2
    authorizationUrl: /oauth2/auth
    tokenUrl: /oauth2/token
    flow: accessCode
    scopes:
      offline: "A scope required when requesting refresh tokens (alias for `offline`)"
      offline_access: "A scope required when requesting refresh tokens"
      openid: "Request an OpenID Connect ID Token"
basic:
    type: basic

Extensions:
---
x-request-id: string
x-forwarded-proto: string
---

swagger:meta