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Authentication
Dashy has a basic login page included, and frontend authentication. You can enable this by adding users to the auth section under appConfig in your conf.yml. If this section is not specified, then no authentication will be required to access the app, and it the homepage will resolve to your dashboard.
Setting Up Authentication
The auth property takes an array of users. Each user needs to include a username, hash and optional user type (admin or normal). The hash property is a SHA-256 Hash of your desired password.
For example:
appConfig:
auth:
- user: alicia
hash: 4D1E58C90B3B94BCAD9848ECCACD6D2A8C9FBC5CA913304BBA5CDEAB36FEEFA3
type: admin
- user: edward
hash: 5E884898DA28047151D0E56F8DC6292773603D0D6AABBDD62A11EF721D1542D8
type: admin
Hash Password
Dashy uses SHA-256 Hash, a 64-character string, which you can generate using an online tool, such as this one or CyberChef (which can be self-hosted/ ran locally).
A hash is a one-way cryptographic function, meaning that it is easy to generate a hash for a given password, but very hard to determine the original password for a given hash. This means, that so long as your password is long, strong and unique, it is safe to store it's hash in the clear. Having said that, you should never reuse passwords, hashes can be cracked by iterating over known password lists, generating a hash of each.
Logging In and Out
Once authentication is enabled, so long as there is no valid token in cookie storage, the application will redirect the user to the login page. When the user enters credentials in the login page, they will be checked, and if valid, then a token will be generated, and they can be redirected to the home page. If credentials are invalid, then an error message will be shown, and they will remain on the login page. Once in the application, to log out the user can click the logout button (in the top-right), which will clear cookie storage, causing them to be redirected back to the login page.
Enabling Guest Access
With authentication setup, by default no access is allowed to your dashboard without first logging in with valid credentials. Guest mode can be enabled to allow for read-only access to a secured dashboard by any user, without the need to log in. A guest user cannot write any changes to the config file, but can apply modifications locally (stored in their browser). You can enable guest access, by setting appConfig.enableGuestAccess: true.
Security
Since all authentication is happening entirely on the client-side, it is vulnerable to manipulation by an adversary. An attacker could look at the source code, find the function used generate the auth token, then decode the minified JavaScript to find the hash, and manually generate a token using it, then just insert that value as a cookie using the console, and become a logged in user. Therefore, if you need secure authentication for your app, it is strongly recommended to implement this using your web server, or use a VPN to control access to Dashy. The purpose of the login page is merely to prevent immediate unauthorized access to your homepage.
Addressing this is on the todo list, and there are several potential solutions:
- Encrypt all site data against the users password, so that an attacker can not physically access any data without the correct decryption key
- Use a backend service to handle authentication and configuration, with no user data returned from the server until the correct credentials are provided. However, this would require either Dashy to be run using it's Node.js server, or the use of an external service
- Implement authentication using a self-hosted identity management solution, such as Keycloak for Vue
Alternative Authentication Methods
If you are self-hosting Dashy, and require secure authentication to prevent unauthorized access, you have several options:
- Authentication Server - Put Dashy behind a self-hosted auth server
- VPN - Use a VPN to tunnel into the network where Dashy is running
- IP-Based Access - Disallow access from all IP addresses, except your own
- Web Server Authentication - Enable user control within your web server or proxy
- OAuth Services - Implement a user management system using a cloud provider
- Password Protection (for cloud providers) - Enable password-protection on your site
Authentication Server
Authelia
Authelia is an open-source full-featured authentication server, which can be self-hosted and either on bare metal, in a Docker container or in a Kubernetes cluster. It allows for fine-grained access control rules based on IP, path, users etc, and supports 2FA, simple password access or bypass policies for your domains.
git clone https://github.com/authelia/authelia.gitcd authelia/examples/compose/lite- Modify the
users_database.ymlthe default username and password is authelia - Modify the
configuration.ymlanddocker-compose.ymlwith your respective domains and secrets docker-compose up -d
For more information, see the Authelia docs
VPN
A catch-all solution to accessing services running from your home network remotely is to use a VPN. It means you do not need to worry about implementing complex authentication rules, or trusting the login implementation of individual applications. However it can be inconvenient to use on a day-to-day basis, and some public and corporate WiFi block VPN connections. Two popular VPN protocols are OpenVPN and WireGuard
IP-Based Access
If you have a static IP or use a VPN to access your running services, then you can use conditional access to block access to Dashy from everyone except users of your pre-defined IP address. This feature is offered by most cloud providers, and supported by most web servers.
Apache
In Apache, this is configured in your .htaccess file in Dashy's root folder, and should look something like:
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from all
Allow from [your-ip]
NGINX
In NGINX you can specify control access rules for a given site in your nginx.conf or hosts file. For example:
server {
listen 80;
server_name www.dashy.example.com;
location / {
root /path/to/dashy/;
passenger_enabled on;
allow [your-ip];
deny all;
}
}
Caddy
In Caddy, Request Matchers can be used to filter requests
dashy.site {
@public_networks not remote_ip [your-ip]
respond @public_networks "Access denied" 403
}
Web Server Authentication
Most web servers make password protecting certain apps very easy. Note that you should also set up HTTPS and have a valid certificate in order for this to be secure.
Apache
First crate a .htaccess file in Dashy's route directory. Specify the auth type and path to where you want to store the password file (usually the same folder). For example:
AuthType Basic
AuthName "Please Sign into Dashy"
AuthUserFile /path/dashy/.htpasswd
require valid-user
Then create a .htpasswd file in the same directory. List users and their hashed passwords here, with one user on each line, and a colon between username and password (e.g. [username]:[hashed-password]). You will need to generate an MD5 hash of your desired password, this can be done with an online tool. Your file will look something like:
alicia:$apr1$jv0spemw$RzOX5/GgY69JMkgV6u16l0
NGINX
NGINX has an authentication module which can be used to add passwords to given sites, and is fairly simple to set up. Similar to above, you will need to create a .htpasswd file. Then just enable auth and specify the path to that file, for example:
location / {
auth_basic "closed site";
auth_basic_user_file conf/htpasswd;
}
Caddy
Caddy has a basic-auth directive, where you specify a username and hash. The password hash needs to be base-64 encoded, the caddy hash-password command can help with this. For example:
basicauth /secret/* {
alicia JDJhJDEwJEVCNmdaNEg2Ti5iejRMYkF3MFZhZ3VtV3E1SzBWZEZ5Q3VWc0tzOEJwZE9TaFlZdEVkZDhX
}
For more info about implementing a single sign on for all your apps with Caddy, see this tutorial
Lighttpd
You can use the mod_auth module to secure your site with Lighttpd. Like with Apache, you need to first create a password file listing your usersnames and hashed passwords, but in Lighttpd, it's usually called .lighttpdpassword.
Then in your lighttpd.conf file (usually in the /etc/lighttpd/ directory), load in the mod_auth module, and configure it's directives. For example:
server.modules += ( "mod_auth" )
auth.debug = 2
auth.backend = "plain"
auth.backend.plain.userfile = "/home/lighttpd/.lighttpdpassword"
$HTTP["host"] == "dashy.my-domain.net" {
server.document-root = "/home/lighttpd/dashy.my-domain.net/http"
server.errorlog = "/var/log/lighttpd/dashy.my-domain.net/error.log"
accesslog.filename = "/var/log/lighttpd/dashy.my-domain.net/access.log"
auth.require = (
"/docs/" => (
"method" => "basic",
"realm" => "Password protected area",
"require" => "user=alicia"
)
)
}
Restart your web server for changes to take effect.
OAuth Services
There are also authentication services, such as Ory.sh, Okta, Auth0, Firebase. Implementing one of these solutions would involve some changes to the Auth.js file, but should be fairly straight forward.
Static Site Hosting Providers
If you are hosting Dashy on a cloud platform, you will probably find that it has built-in support for password protected access to web apps. For more info, see the relevant docs for your provider, for example: Netlify Password Protection, Cloudflare Access, AWS Cognito, Azure Authentication and Vercel Password Protection.