Most of the apps I use support external authentication using popular standards (OAuth for most part). This means the clients will also support the said standards out of the box. Having a standardized authentication flow makes logging in much easier as well.

I also don’t want to deal with passwords… because I don’t trust myself to handle passwords. So before settling down on Authentik, I used FusionAuth to do OIDC via Google. Then I discovered I could do WebAuthn / Passkey with Authentik, so the portal really only ever need to know my public key, and approves access based on private keys, which are gated by my devices’ biometric features. This is way more secure than other solutions and I don’t even need to remember a password.

The one edge case I’ve encountered is a couple of apps recently transitioning to mandating authentication, but doesn’t have OIDC integration of their own. Fortunately, there’s a hidden config flag in XML that I can use to tell them that I have externally managed authentication, and I gate access to them via a middleware in my reverse proxy. As for client, my client of choice allows me to add custom HTTP headers, so I have a special “API key” kind of header that my reverse proxy looks at, which allow me to bypass authentication, so everything works nicely together.

In my mind, using the vanilla out of the box authentication feels less secure than me gating things via OIDC or middleware. This is because everyone knows they could Google for “Powered by WordPress” or similar phrase to target specific apps with known authentication exploit. However, by switching it up and using a different mechanism, the common exploit vectors might not be as effective against my deployment.