How does Okta work? A complete guide

How does Okta work?

Okta works by offering organizations an easy way to authenticate and authorize users across different applications and environments. In the following sections, we will explore various concepts that govern the world of Okta.

What is API access management?

Okta offers an OAuth-as-a-service model for API access management, which has several advantages for organizations:

• Centralized control over all APIs increases efficiency and reduces the chances of misconfigurations.
• Instead of using credentials (usernames and passwords) for authentication, Okta uses short-lived tokens with well-defined scopes. This drastically reduces the overall attack surface of an infrastructure.
• Okta users can create custom authorization servers for different sets of APIs, products, or customers.
• Okta users can restrict access to APIs and applications using policies that can contain complicated conditions and rules.
• Okta allows users to create different scopes and claims. Scopes are used to outline the access privileges that an application requests from a user during authorization. For example, the phone scope requests access to the user’s phone number. Claims are pieces of information about a user that are present within tokens. For example, a claim may specify the identity or name of a user.
• Okta users can focus on their business rather than worrying about changes in authentication standards. Okta takes care of the updates and ensures that users are always using the latest authentication methods.

What are Okta policies?

Policies are JSON documents that govern access to applications and APIs. Each policy document contains a set of rules that are evaluated to determine whether to allow or deny a login request. Okta supports different factors to restrict or grant access, including device, time, location, and group membership. For example, you may define a policy that grants all members of a user group access to an AWS Lambda function.

Administrators can use policies to achieve a variety of use cases, such as the following:

• Define fine-grained authorization rules, including the resources a user can access and the operations they can perform on those resources.
• Enforce additional layers of authentication for sensitive applications, such as configuring multi-factor authentication for accessing a database that contains customer data.
• Specify a list of authorized users and deny access to everyone else.
• Fetch user information from an external identity provider to authorize the user.

Okta supports different types of policies:

• Sign-on policies: These policies define authentication flows using IF/THEN rules. The IF part of a rule specifies the context, whereas the THEN part specifies the login experience. For example, IF a user’s IP address falls within a configured range THEN don’t ask them for a secondary authentication factor.
• Password policies: These policies are used to govern the strength and complexity of user passwords. They can also be used to control how often users must change their passwords and how to recover lost or forgotten passwords.
• Enrollment policies: These policies are further divided into authenticator enrollment and profile enrollment policies. Authenticator enrollment policies are used to enroll authenticators and configure methods for MFA. Profile enrollment policies define the attributes used for verifying users during authentication.
• API access policies: These policies are used to authenticate and authorize client applications with Okta.

Okta creates a default policy for each policy type. This ensures that there is a fallback policy that can be applied to a user, regardless of the situation.

What are authorization servers?

An authorization server supplies the tokens used for OAuth 2.0 or OpenID Connect workflows. It can also be used to enforce access policies. Okta supports two kinds of authorization servers:

Org authorization server

Okta offers a built-in authorization server, known as the org authorization server. It’s not possible to modify the audience, policies, claims, or scopes of this authorization server. Use it to obtain an access token for Okta APIs or perform single sign-on for apps that support OpenID Connect.

Okta provides the following endpoints to retrieve OAuth or OpenID Connect metadata for the default authorization server:

 
OpenID: https://${organization-name}/.well-known/openid-configuration
                  

 
OAuth: https://${organization-name}/.well-known/oauth-authorization-server
                  

Custom authorization server

This authorization server allows you to define and enforce authorization policies for your APIs. Okta users can create multiple authorization servers within a single Okta organization to cater to different API security use cases. Each custom server can have its own scopes, access policies, and claims.

Every Okta organization includes a default custom authorization server that has a standard access policy and a rule. The ID of the default custom server is default, and it can be used as follows:

 
https://${okta-domain}/api/v1/authorizationServers/default
              

User-created custom servers are given a unique and random alphanumeric ID. Okta provides the following endpoints to retrieve OAuth or OpenID Connect metadata for a custom authorization server:

 
OpenID: https://${okta-domain}/oauth2/${authorizationServerId}/.well-known/openid-configuration 

 
OAuth: https://${okta-domain}/oauth2/${authorizationServerId}/.well-known/oauth-authorization-server 

To get the same for the default custom server, use these endpoints:

 
OpenID: https://${okta-domain}/oauth2/default/.well-known/openid-configuration 

 
OAuth: https://${okta-domain}/oauth2/default/.well-known/oauth-authorization-server 

What are Okta brands?

Okta brands enable organizations to tweak the design of different Okta pages and templates, including the login page, loading page, error pages, and end user dashboard. Organizations can change the logo, colors, background images, display language, and fonts used in Okta.

Okta offers multi-brand customization, which allows users to create and manage multiple brands within the same organization. This makes it significantly easier to set up multi-tenant architectures. Users can define multiple custom domains and bind each domain with a unique version of the login page, error pages, and end user dashboard.

Okta also provides public APIs to programmatically manage branding, including APIs for creating a brand, retrieving customized error pages, replacing customized error pages, and listing all email customizations.

What are event hooks?

Event hooks are asynchronous HTTPS REST calls to external URLs that are triggered based on events in an Okta organization. The request body of an event hook may contain JSON objects that describe the event.

Okta supports different types of events. For example, users can report events when:

• An approver denies an access request
• A Certificate Signing Request (CSR) is revoked
• An unauthorized user tries to access an application
• An application signing key is rotated

Event hooks are a great way to notify a target system of important events, automate event-driven tasks, or gather data for analytics.

How to integrate external identity providers with Okta

Okta can connect seamlessly to external identity providers. In such an architecture, Okta acts as the user store sitting between the application and the external identity provider(s). The application only needs to connect to Okta, while Okta manages the connections to the external provider(s).

This approach has several benefits, including the following:

• Single protocol: The application only needs to use the OpenID Connect protocol to integrate with Okta. Okta is responsible for integrating with external providers that may support different protocols.
• Single source of truth: All user attributes are stored centrally in the Okta Universal Directory.
• One-to-many user-profile mapping: A user can use different identity providers to sign in, and Okta can link these multiple identity profiles to the same user.

Here’s how the external identity verification works:

• A user tries to sign in to the application.
• The application redirects the user to Okta.
• Okta redirects the user to the external identity provider.
• The user signs in at the external identity provider.
• The identity provider redirects the user back to Okta.
• Okta provisions the user on the Universal Directory.
• The user is finally redirected back to the application.

How to get started with Okta

To get started with Okta, you need to sign up on the official website and choose a plan that best meets your needs. Once you have registered and logged in successfully, you can follow these five steps to configure a new Okta organization:

• Import some users from an app or a directory. Okta supports anything-as-a-source, which allows you to integrate with any data source.
• Configure basic SSO for an application.
• Create a second admin user.
• Choose some MFA factors for additional protection.
• Define a new sign-on policy that configures MFA for all users.

Okta provides application clients and starter kits for multiple languages and frameworks, including PHP, Node.js, Java Spring Boot, JavaScript, React, and Angular. It also provides detailed guides on all the steps you need to take to get started, such as user management, directory integration, app integrations, browser plugins, sign-on policies, MFA, risk-based authentication, and threat analytics.

Conclusion

Okta is a cloud-based identity provider with a diverse feature set. To manage and monitor your Okta logs effectively, please check out our open source plugin from Site24x7. You can also use Okta to implement adaptive multi-factor authentication (MFA), perform identity governance, enable single sign-on (SSO) for all your applications, or enforce passwordless authentication that’s compliant with OAuth standards.