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Ory Oathkeeper is an Identity & Access Proxy (IAP) and Access Control Decision API that authorizes HTTP requests based on sets of Access Rules. It follows the BeyondCorp model designed by Google and secures applications in Zero-Trust networks.

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• What is Ory Oathkeeper?
  • Why Ory Oathkeeper
• Deployment options
  • Installation
• Quickstart
• Who is using Ory Oathkeeper
• Ecosystem
  • Ory Kratos: Identity and User Infrastructure and Management
  • Ory Hydra: OAuth2 & OpenID Connect Server
  • Ory Oathkeeper: Identity & Access Proxy
  • Ory Keto: Access Control Policies as a Server
• Documentation
• Developing Ory Oathkeeper
• Security
  • Disclosing vulnerabilities
• Telemetry

What is Ory Oathkeeper?

Ory Oathkeeper is an Identity & Access Proxy (IAP) and Access Control Decision API. It follows cloud architecture best practices and focuses on:

• Authenticating and authorizing HTTP requests
• Acting as a reverse proxy or decision API
• Mutating requests with identity information
• Integrating with existing API gateways and proxies
• Supporting multiple authentication and authorization strategies
• Working in Zero-Trust network architectures

We recommend starting with the Ory Oathkeeper introduction docs to learn more about its architecture, feature set, and how it compares to other systems.

Why Ory Oathkeeper

Ory Oathkeeper is designed to:

• Decouple authentication and authorization from application code
• Work as an API Gateway plugin or standalone proxy
• Support flexible access rules for different endpoints
• Integrate with Ambassador, Envoy, AWS API Gateway, Nginx, and more
• Provide both proxy and sidecar deployment modes
• Scale without effort in cloud native environments

Oathkeeper works with:

• Ambassador via auth service
• Envoy via the External Authorization HTTP Filter
• AWS API Gateway via Custom Authorizers
• Nginx via Authentication Based on Subrequest Result

Deployment options

You can run Ory Oathkeeper in two main ways:

• As a managed service on the Ory Network
• As a self hosted service under your own control, with or without the Ory Enterprise License

Installation

You can run Ory Oathkeeper yourself for full control over infrastructure, deployment, and customization.

The install guide explains how to:

• Install Oathkeeper on Linux, macOS, Windows, and Docker
• Configure access rules and authentication strategies
• Deploy to Kubernetes and other orchestration systems

This guide uses the open source distribution to get you started without license requirements. It is a great fit for individuals, researchers, hackers, and companies that want to experiment, prototype, or run unimportant workloads without SLAs. You get the full core engine, and you are free to inspect, extend, and build it from source.

If you run Oathkeeper as part of a business-critical system, you should use a commercial agreement to reduce operational and security risk. The Ory Enterprise License (OEL) layers on top of self-hosted Oathkeeper and provides:

• Additional enterprise features that are not available in the open source version
• Regular security releases, including CVE patches, with service level agreements
• Support for advanced scaling, multi-tenancy, and complex deployments
• Premium support options with SLAs, direct access to engineers, and onboarding help
• Access to a private Docker registry with frequent and vetted, up-to-date enterprise builds

For guaranteed CVE fixes, current enterprise builds, advanced features, and support in production, you need a valid Ory Enterprise License and access to the Ory Enterprise Docker registry. To learn more, contact the Ory team.

Quickstart

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

Who is using Ory Oathkeeper

The Ory community stands on the shoulders of individuals, companies, and maintainers. The Ory team thanks everyone involved - from submitting bug reports and feature requests, to contributing patches and documentation. The Ory community counts more than 50.000 members and is growing. The Ory stack protects 7.000.000.000+ API requests every day across thousands of companies. None of this would have been possible 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 office@ory.com now!

Many thanks to all individual contributors

Ecosystem

We build Ory on several guiding principles when it comes to our architecture design:

• Minimal dependencies
• Runs everywhere
• Scales without effort
• Minimize room for human and network errors

Ory's architecture is designed to run best on a Container Orchestration system such as Kubernetes, CloudFoundry, OpenShift, and similar projects. Binaries are small (5-15MB) and available for all popular processor types (ARM, AMD64, i386) and operating systems (FreeBSD, Linux, macOS, Windows) without system dependencies (Java, Node, Ruby, libxml, ...).

Ory Kratos: Identity and User Infrastructure and Management

Ory Kratos is an API-first Identity and User Management system that is built according to cloud architecture best practices. It implements core use cases that almost every software application needs to deal with: Self-service Login and Registration, Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA/2FA), Account Recovery and Verification, Profile, and Account Management.

Ory Hydra: OAuth2 & OpenID Connect Server

Ory Hydra is an OpenID Certified™ OAuth2 and OpenID Connect Provider which easily connects to any existing identity system by writing a tiny "bridge" application. It gives absolute control over the user interface and user experience flows.

Ory Oathkeeper: Identity & Access Proxy

Ory Oathkeeper is a BeyondCorp/Zero Trust Identity & Access Proxy (IAP) with configurable authentication, authorization, and request mutation rules for your web services: Authenticate JWT, Access Tokens, API Keys, mTLS; Check if the contained subject is allowed to perform the request; Encode resulting content into custom headers (X-User-ID), JSON Web Tokens and more!

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.

Documentation

The full Oathkeeper documentation is available at www.ory.com/docs/oathkeeper, including:

• Installation guides
• Configuration reference
• HTTP API documentation
• Access rule configuration

For upgrading and changelogs, check UPGRADE.md and CHANGELOG.md.

Developing Ory Oathkeeper

See DEVELOP.md for information on:

• Contribution guidelines
• Prerequisites
• Install from source
• Running tests
• Build Docker image

Security

Disclosing vulnerabilities

If you think you found a security vulnerability, please refrain from posting it publicly on the forums, the chat, or GitHub. You can find all info for responsible disclosure in our security.txt.

Telemetry

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