Access Tokens

Cross-Instance Authentication

Access tokens support cross-instance authentication through a "circle of trust" established by sharing a public certificate among all participating instances. It is up to the Service administrator to make sure that all participating instances are equipped with the certificates. This means that any instance can generate a token to be used with any other instance within the circle of trust. When a Service instance receives a REST API call authenticated by a signed token, it will use the root certificate that includes the public key to verify that its issuer is in the circle of trust. Even while running, the system is aware of any new certificates that have been added or removed.  

Establishing a Circle of Trust

To establish a "circle of trust" between JFrog services, you need to exchange public certificates between the services.
To exchange the certificates, you need to copy a service’s root certificate to another service’s $JFROG_HOME/artifactory/var/etc/access/keys/trusted folder.

The service's root certificate can be acquired in the following ways:

• found under $JFROG_HOME/artifactory/var/etc/access/keys/root.crt (requires physical access to the server)
• by calling Get Root Certificate REST API

Trust can be created between multiple services. you need to make sure that all participating instances in the circle of trust are equipped with the relevant public keys (root certificate). Note that a trust can be unidirectional or bidirectional. The services watch a directory of trusted public keys and reloads the keys when it needs to verify a token.

Certificates in HA

Using Tokens

There are several ways you can use access tokens for authentication.

Basic Authentication

An access token can be used instead of a password for basic authentication. This may be useful when you need a client (such as certain dependency managers) that only supports basic authentication to access Artifactory. In this case, it is important to access Artifactory using the same user name provided when creating the token (with -d "username=<USERNAME>").

For example, to use an access token as a password to ping JFrog Platform URL, you could use:

curl -u<USERNAME>:<TOKEN> http://JFROG_PLATFORM_URL/router/api/v1/system/ping

Authorization Headers

An access token can be used as a bearer token in authorization headers. This is especially useful for authenticating CI servers with Artifactory instead of using credentials, since you don't need to have a user defined in Artifactory if the group provided in -d "member-of-groups:<GROUP>" is configured in that Artifactory instance. As a result, there is no need to manage fictitious users for your different automation tools that need access to Artifactory. 

For example, to use an access token as a bearer token to ping Artifactory you could use:

curl -H"Authorization: Bearer <TOKEN>" http://JFROG_PLATFORM_URL/router/api/v1/system/ping

Support Authentication for Non-Existing Users

One of the big advantages of access tokens is the fact that you don't have to create a user in Artifactory to use them. When creating a token, you can specify a user name that does not exist, and Artifactory will create a transient user that will only exist as long as the token is valid. This can be useful when providing access to different tools such as a CI server coordinating a build without having to manage fake user accounts. This method is also more secure since you can assign a new token for each "job" that the external tool runs.

Generating Expirable Tokens

You can limit the validity period of a token by setting the expiry time when generating a token. If set, the token will be valid until the expiration time will pass. 
You can also set a token to be non-expirable by setting the expiry to zero, in which case it will be valid indefinitely until actively revoked. 

This value is set by using the "expires_in=<VALUE_IN_SECONDS>" param when generating the token (see example in REST API section below). If not used the default value will be 3600 meaning your token will be valid for one hour.

Generating Refreshable Tokens

As mentioned above, you can limit the validity period of an token by setting its expiry time. To allow extending access privileges of a token once it has expired, you can provide a refresh token which will generate a new token with the same privileges as the original one. This takes token management out of the hands of its issuer and delegates it to the user who received the token.

Generating Admin Tokens

Available from Artifactory version 7.4.

In general, the scope for a token is defined by specifying the groups into which the token is included, however, an Artifactory administrator can also create a token with admin privileges. This can be useful for JFrog Mission Control and JFrog Xray since both of these complementary applications require admin permissions to work seamlessly with Artifactory. With this capability, when Mission Control or Xray connect to an instance of Artifactory, they can create an admin tokens and use that for authentication instead of using basic authentication with a username and password.

To create an admin token, from the administration module, go to Identity and Access | Access Tokens screen | Generate Admin Token.

Viewing and Revoking Tokens

Any token created with expiry greater than the revocable-expiry-threshold parameter can be revoked using the Revoke Token REST API endpoint or in the Access Tokens page in the UI. Note that you can only revoke a token on the instance (or cluster) that issued it unless that instance is part of an Access Federation setup (which requires an Enterprise+ license).

A token with an expiry specified will lapse automatically upon reaching its expiry period.

A token that is not expirable (i.e. it was created with its expires_in parameter set to 0) must be actively revoked to terminate its usage. 

To revoke an access token:

1. From the Administration module, select Identity and Access | Access Tokens.
2. From the list, select an access token and click Revoke.
   

REST API

All management of access tokens is done via REST API through the endpoints described below.

Get Root Certificate

Receive public root certificate for the server

For details, refer to the JFrog Artifactory REST API documentation for Get Root Certificate

Create Token

Creates an access token. 

For details, refer to the JFrog Artifactory REST API documentation for Create Token.

Refresh Token

Refresh an access token to extend its validity. If only the access token and the refresh token are provided (and no other parameters), this pair is used for authentication. If username or any other parameter is provided, then the request must be authenticated by a token that grants admin permissions.

For details, refer to the JFrog Artifactory REST API documentation for Refresh Token.

Revoke Token

Revoke an access token 

For details, refer to the JFrog Artifactory REST API documentation for Revoke Token.

Get Service ID

Provides the service ID of an Artifactory instance or cluster

For details, refer to the JFrog Artifactory REST API documentation for Get Service ID.