After spending some time playing with a couple of self-hosted Identity Providers solutions like Authentik and Keycloak for use with vCenter Server Identity Federation, I was curious about their Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) support. Specifically, I was interested in their WebAuthn capabilities, which should allow me to use the popular Yubico YubiKey for passwordless authentication into my VMware environment. 😊
It is also important to mention, today vCenter Server Identity Federation officially supports the following IdPs listed below, all of which have support for the YubiKey (linked below is the official Yubico documentation for each IdP from Yubico's website):
If you are already consuming one of these IdPs, you already have the ability to to use a YubiKey or other supported WebAuthn device for passwordless login! For VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) customers, Identity Federation is also supported with the same IdPs as it relies on the VCF Management Domain vCenter Server, so this would allow you to login to SDDC Manager using YubiKey as an example.
I have never used a YubiKey before, so this was going to be a new adventure for me as well as playing with the WebAuthn protocol which is also new for me. I really like the UX of Authentik, which provides a seamless experience and with built-in support for SCIM, the choice was easy for the IdP I would choose for this experiment.
