Authorization Manager

An Authorization Manager is an instance of the AuthManager class that is plugged into one of the Feast servers to extract user details from the current request and inject them into the permission framework.

{% hint style="info" %} Note: Feast does not provide authentication capabilities; it is the client's responsibility to manage the authentication token and pass it to the Feast server, which then validates the token and extracts user details from the configured authentication server. {% endhint %}

Two authorization managers are supported out-of-the-box:

• One using a configurable OIDC server to extract the user details.
• One using the Kubernetes RBAC resources to extract the user details.

These instances are created when the Feast servers are initialized, according to the authorization configuration defined in their own feature_store.yaml.

Feast servers and clients must have consistent authorization configuration, so that the client proxies can automatically inject the authorization tokens that the server can properly identify and use to enforce permission validations.

Design notes

The server-side implementation of the authorization functionality is defined here. Few of the key models, classes to understand the authorization implementation on the client side can be found here.

Default Authorization Behavior

Feast Operator (Kubernetes Deployments)

When deploying Feast using the Feast operator, Kubernetes authentication is enabled by default. If no authz section is specified in the FeatureStore CR, the operator automatically configures kubernetes auth for all deployed services.

This follows an "Authenticated by Default, Authorized Gradually" security model:

• All Feast endpoints require a valid Kubernetes bearer token by default.
• If no explicit Permission objects are defined (via permissions.py + feast apply), all authenticated users are granted full access. A warning is logged to remind administrators to define fine-grained permissions.
• Unauthenticated requests are rejected.

This ensures that Feast deployments are never accidentally exposed without authentication, while allowing teams to incrementally adopt fine-grained RBAC.

Disabling Authentication with noAuth

For development, testing, or environments where authentication is handled externally, you can explicitly disable authentication using the noAuth option in the FeatureStore CR:

apiVersion: feast.dev/v1
kind: FeatureStore
metadata:
  name: my-feature-store
spec:
  feastProject: my_project
  authz:
    noAuth: true

{% hint style="warning" %} Setting noAuth: true disables all authentication and authorization. All endpoints become publicly accessible without any identity checks. Only use this for local development or testing environments. For production, use kubernetes or oidc authentication. {% endhint %}

Explicit Kubernetes Auth (Default)

This is equivalent to the default behavior when no authz section is provided:

apiVersion: feast.dev/v1
kind: FeatureStore
metadata:
  name: my-feature-store
spec:
  feastProject: my_project
  authz:
    kubernetes: {}

OIDC Auth via Operator

apiVersion: feast.dev/v1
kind: FeatureStore
metadata:
  name: my-feature-store
spec:
  feastProject: my_project
  authz:
    oidc:
      secretRef:
        name: feast-oidc-secret

Standalone Deployments (feature_store.yaml)

Configuring Authorization

The authorization is configured using a dedicated auth section in the feature_store.yaml configuration.

Note: As a consequence, when deploying the Feast servers with the Helm charts, the feature_store_yaml_base64 value must include the auth section to specify the authorization configuration.

No Authorization

This configuration applies the no_auth authorization:

project: my-project
auth:
  type: no_auth
...

{% hint style="warning" %} Running with auth.type: no_auth leaves all endpoints unauthenticated. This is suitable for local development only. For production deployments, configure kubernetes or oidc authentication. {% endhint %}

OIDC Authorization

With OIDC authorization, the Feast client proxies retrieve the JWT token from an OIDC server (or Identity Provider) and append it in every request to a Feast server, using an Authorization Bearer Token.

The server, in turn, uses the same OIDC server to validate the token and extract user details — including username, roles, and groups — from the token itself.

Some assumptions are made in the OIDC server configuration:

• The OIDC token refers to a client with roles matching the RBAC roles of the configured Permissions (*)
• The roles are exposed in the access token under resource_access.<client_id>.roles (Keycloak) or in the top-level roles claim (Entra ID app roles). Roles found in both are merged.
• The JWT token is expected to have a verified signature and not be expired. The Feast OIDC token parser logic validates for verify_signature and verify_exp so make sure that the given OIDC provider is configured to meet these requirements. The token's audience and issuer claims are not verified by default; both checks can be enabled with the audience and issuer options (see Server-Side Configuration).
• The username is read from the first of preferred_username, upn, azp, appid, sub present in the token. Entra ID client-credentials (app-only) tokens carry no user claim, so they authenticate as the calling application.
• For GroupBasedPolicy support, the groups claim should be present in the access token (requires a "Group Membership" protocol mapper in Keycloak).
• Entra ID limitation: Group claims use object IDs (GUIDs) instead of names, and are omitted entirely when a user exceeds the group overage threshold. GroupBasedPolicy must reference GUIDs and cannot be used for principals with large group memberships.

(*) Please note that the role match is case-sensitive, e.g. the name of the role in the OIDC server and in the Permission configuration must be exactly the same.

For example, the access token for a client app of a user with reader role and membership in the data-team group should have the following claims:

{
  "preferred_username": "alice",
  "resource_access": {
    "app": {
      "roles": [
        "reader"
      ]
    }
  },
  "groups": [
    "data-team"
  ]
}

A Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD) client-credentials (app-only) token has no user claim; the application authenticates as itself, and its app roles arrive in the top-level roles claim:

{
  "azp": "11111111-2222-3333-4444-555555555555",
  "roles": [
    "reader"
  ]
}

Server-Side Configuration

The server requires auth_discovery_url and client_id to validate incoming JWT tokens via JWKS:

project: my-project
auth:
  type: oidc
  client_id: _CLIENT_ID_
  auth_discovery_url: _OIDC_SERVER_URL_/realms/master/.well-known/openid-configuration
...

When the OIDC provider uses a self-signed or untrusted TLS certificate (e.g. internal Keycloak on OpenShift), set verify_ssl to false to disable certificate verification:

auth:
  type: oidc
  client_id: _CLIENT_ID_
  auth_discovery_url: https://keycloak.internal/realms/master/.well-known/openid-configuration
  verify_ssl: false

{% hint style="warning" %} Setting verify_ssl: false disables TLS certificate verification for all OIDC provider communication (discovery, JWKS, token endpoint). Only use this in development or internal environments where you accept the security risk. {% endhint %}

By default the server verifies only the token's signature and expiry: any validly-signed, unexpired token from the configured provider is accepted regardless of the audience it was minted for, and authorization (role matching) is the only remaining gate. For defense in depth, set audience and/or issuer to additionally require a matching aud / iss claim:

auth:
  type: oidc
  client_id: _CLIENT_ID_
  auth_discovery_url: https://login.example.com/.well-known/openid-configuration
  audience: api://feast-feature-server
  issuer: https://login.example.com/realms/master

A token whose aud (or iss) claim does not match is rejected at authentication. The two options are independent; leave one unset to skip that check.

{% hint style="warning" %} Set these to the values your IdP puts in the token itself, which are not always the ones in the discovery document. For example, Microsoft Entra ID commonly issues v1.0 tokens (iss: https://sts.windows.net/<tenant-id>/, aud: api://<app-id-uri>) even when auth_discovery_url points at the v2.0 endpoint. That setup keeps working with these options unset, or set to the v1.0 values — but copying the v2.0 issuer from the discovery document would reject every v1.0 token. {% endhint %}

To validate token signatures the server fetches the provider's JWKS document and caches it, refetching when the cache expires or when a token presents an unknown key id. Two options tune that behavior:

auth:
  type: oidc
  client_id: _CLIENT_ID_
  auth_discovery_url: https://login.example.com/.well-known/openid-configuration
  jwks_cache_lifespan_seconds: 300   # default; how long the fetched key set is reused
  jwks_request_timeout_seconds: 10   # default; network timeout for the JWKS fetch

jwks_cache_lifespan_seconds also bounds how long a key the provider has revoked continues to validate tokens, so lower it if your provider rotates or revokes aggressively; each reduction costs proportionally more JWKS fetches. Key rotations that introduce a new key id are picked up immediately regardless of this setting, because an unknown key id triggers a refetch. jwks_request_timeout_seconds bounds how long an unresponsive provider can block request serving. Both must be greater than zero.

Client-Side Configuration

The client supports multiple token source modes. The SDK resolves tokens in the following priority order:

1. Intra-communication token — internal server-to-server calls (via INTRA_COMMUNICATION_BASE64 env var)
2. token — a static JWT string provided directly in the configuration
3. token_env_var — the name of an environment variable containing the JWT
4. client_secret — fetches a token from the OIDC provider using client credentials or ROPC flow (requires auth_discovery_url and client_id)
5. FEAST_OIDC_TOKEN — default fallback environment variable
6. Kubernetes service account token — read from /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount/token when running inside a pod

Token passthrough (for use with external token providers like kube-authkit):

project: my-project
auth:
  type: oidc
  token_env_var: FEAST_OIDC_TOKEN

Or with a bare type: oidc (no other fields) — the SDK falls back to the FEAST_OIDC_TOKEN environment variable or a mounted Kubernetes service account token:

project: my-project
auth:
  type: oidc

Client credentials / ROPC flow (existing behavior, unchanged):

project: my-project
auth:
  type: oidc
  client_id: test_client_id
  client_secret: test_client_secret
  username: test_user_name
  password: test_password
  auth_discovery_url: http://localhost:8080/realms/master/.well-known/openid-configuration

When using client credentials or ROPC flows, the verify_ssl setting also applies to the discovery and token endpoint requests.

Multi-Token Support (OIDC + Kubernetes Service Account)

When the Feast server is configured with OIDC auth and deployed on Kubernetes, the OidcTokenParser can handle both Keycloak JWT tokens and Kubernetes service account tokens. Incoming tokens that contain a kubernetes.io claim are validated via the Kubernetes Token Access Review API and the namespace is extracted from the authenticated identity — no RBAC queries are performed, so the server service account only needs tokenreviews/create permission. All other tokens follow the standard OIDC/Keycloak JWKS validation path. This enables NamespaceBasedPolicy enforcement for service account tokens while using GroupBasedPolicy and RoleBasedPolicy for OIDC user tokens.

Kubernetes RBAC Authorization

With Kubernetes RBAC Authorization, the client uses the service account token as the authorizarion bearer token, and the server fetches the associated roles from the Kubernetes RBAC resources. Feast supports advanced authorization by extracting user groups and namespaces from Kubernetes tokens, enabling fine-grained access control beyond simple role matching. This is achieved by leveraging Kubernetes Token Access Review, which allows Feast to determine the groups and namespaces associated with a user or service account.

An example of Kubernetes RBAC authorization configuration is the following: {% hint style="info" %} NOTE: This configuration will only work if you deploy feast on Openshift or a Kubernetes platform. {% endhint %}

project: my-project
auth:
  type: kubernetes
  user_token: <user_token> #Optional, else service account token Or env var is used for getting the token
...

In case the client cannot run on the same cluster as the servers, the client token can be injected using the LOCAL_K8S_TOKEN environment variable on the client side. The value must refer to the token of a service account created on the servers cluster and linked to the desired RBAC roles/groups/namespaces.

More details can be found in Setting up kubernetes doc