API Authentication and machine to machine service clients

Next to User authentication, Authress provides a straightforward and secure way to generate API keys.

For your technical customers that want to authenticate against your APIs or your internal services that need to communicate with each other. Authress providers Service Clients.

Service Clients are the way that Authress identifies a programmatic entity that wants to authenticate with other services. These clients can be used to make calls to Authress or be used to generate tokens that can be directly validated by your application services as well.

Service Client authentication

There are a few different ways service clients many be used:

1. Enabling Machine to Machine authorization

Your services want to communicate with each other, and verify the caller of each api request. To do this service clients should be generated for each service, and access keys are used to secure that communication.

See enabling Machine to Machine authorization.

2. Providing customers API Keys

Your users want to call your APIs. To enable this Authress provides a first-class interface for creating Service Clients and Access Keys to be used as API keys.

See creating user api keys.

3. Third party developer marketplace

When creating an application or developer marketplace, Authress enables service clients to be distributed to your plugin developers for integration into your platform.

See creating Platform Extensions.

4. OAuth2 client integration

Authress service clients are OAuth2 compatible. That means any platform that requires an OAuth2 service client and secret, Authress can be used.

See creating service client secrets via an access key.