Safer dummy auth plugin

[mgaonach]

The dummy auth plugin allows to impersonate any user and to get any permission, which is very useful for dev and test.
But if this plugin ends up enabled in a production environment by mistake, it would be a big security issue.

We should find a way to make sure this cannot happen. Some ideas:

• Ideally, find some way to make it impossible to enable it in production
• Otherwise, add a safety layer (ask for confirmation when enabled at startup?)

Any other idea?

[antolinos]

I wonder if it should made a little bit less dummy.

An authentication that reads the users/password/groups from files file, like e.d: wildfly does, could be a good starting point and useful for testing. It makes a basic protection because you still need a username and a password that is configured in your server.

I have seen warnings when starting different services/apps if a configuration parameter is not expected in production but I might not want to stop the process (just in case a health-check mechanism is in place). If the dummy-auth is enabled it can be warned.

Nevertheless, with or without dummies, my opinion is that the deployment has to be done carefully and with no mistakes.