This project is a simplified backend authentication and authorization service. It explores how systems manage user identity, secure access, and session control in a microservices architecture.
The goal is to understand how authentication works under the hood and how identity becomes a foundational layer for all backend systems.
Modern distributed systems require a secure way to verify user identity and control access to resources. Authentication services must handle login, token issuance, validation, and session management while remaining secure, scalable, and resilient to abuse.
This project explores how to design a simplified authentication system that can support multiple services in a distributed environment.
- Understand authentication vs authorization
- Learn how token-based authentication works (JWT conceptually or implemented)
- Explore session management strategies
- Understand secure password storage concepts
- Learn how identity is propagated across services
- Explore tradeoffs between stateless and stateful auth systems
- Build intuition for security in backend systems
- User login and credential validation
- Secure password handling (hashing conceptually or implemented)
- Basic registration flow
- Issue authentication tokens (e.g., JWT-style concept)
- Validate tokens on request
- Token expiration handling
- Refresh token concept (optional)
- Role-based access control (RBAC conceptually or implemented)
- Protecting routes based on user identity
- Service-to-service identity propagation (conceptual)
- Stateless token-based sessions or stateful session store (depending on implementation)
- Session expiration and revocation strategies
- Central service responsible for identity verification
- Issues and validates authentication tokens
- Stores user credentials and metadata
- Supports secure password hashing and lookup
- Encodes user identity and claims
- Used by downstream services for authorization decisions
- Validate token with each request
- Rely on authentication service or shared token validation logic
- Secure password storage (hashing + salting concepts)
- Token expiration and replay prevention
- Stateless vs stateful authentication tradeoffs
- Security of token signing keys
- Handling login abuse and rate limiting
- Session invalidation challenges
- Tradeoffs between performance and security
- Rate Limiter (prevent brute force login attempts)
- Distributed Systems (identity propagation across services)
- Backend Services (used as foundational auth layer)
- API Gateway (central authentication enforcement layer)
- Monitoring system (track login attempts and anomalies)
🟡 Planned