authentik/website/docs/core/certificates.md

title
Certificates

Certificates in authentik are used for the following use cases:

• Signing and verifying SAML Requests and Responses
• Signing JSON Web Tokens for OAuth and OIDC
• Connecting to remote docker hosts using the Docker integration
• Verifying LDAP Servers' certificates
• Encrypting outposts's endpoints

Default certificate

Every authentik install generates a self-signed certificate on the first start. The certificate is called authentik Self-signed Certificate and is valid for 1 year.

This certificate is generated to be used as a default for all OAuth2/OIDC providers, as these don't require the certificate to be configured on both sides (the signature of a JWT is validated using the JWKS URL).

This certificate can also be used for SAML Providers/Sources, just keep in mind that the certificate is only valid for a year. Some SAML applications require the certificate to be valid, so they might need to be rotated regularly.

For SAML use-cases, you can generate a Certificate that's valid for longer than 1 year, on your own risk.

External certificates

To use externally managed certificates, for example generated with certbot or HashiCorp Vault, you can use the discovery feature.

The docker-compose installation maps a certs directory to /certs, you can simply use this as an output directory for certbot.

For Kubernetes, you can map custom secrets/volumes under /certs.

You can also bind mount single files into the folder, as long as they fall under this naming schema.

• Files in the root directory will be imported based on their filename.

  /foo.pem Will be imported as the keypair foo. Based on its content its either imported as certificate or private key.

  Files containing PRIVATE KEY it will imported as private key.

  Otherwise it will be imported as certificate.

• If the file is called fullchain.pem or privkey.pem (the output naming of certbot), they will get the name of the parent folder.

• Files can be in any arbitrary file structure, and can have extension.

certs/
├── baz
│   └── bar.baz
│       ├── fullchain.pem
│       └── privkey.key
├── foo.bar
│   ├── fullchain.pem
│   └── privkey.key
├── foo.key
└── foo.pem

Files are checked every 5 minutes, and will trigger an Outpost refresh if the files differ.