Auth0 was excited to host our first Actions Hackathon on Oct 28, 2021. Teams from around the globe participated in a day-long event that saw hackers take their best shot at creating their versions of the newest Auth0 extensibility feature - Actions.
But, What Even Is Actions Anyway?
We are always looking for new tools and solutions that allow you to customize your identity solution. Our first extensibility tool was Auth0 Rules, serverless code blocks that can be customized to extend Auth0's core capabilities. Next up was Auth0 Hooks, similar to Rules but can be executed against several extensibility points.
Auth0 Actions is the next evolution in our extensibility toolset. An Action is a functional service that fires after specific triggers across an identity flow; these could be events such as a post-login or client credential exchange.
Okay, so Let’s Get down to the Winning Teams and What They Built
The Hack kicked off Thursday morning with six developer teams.
After a roughly four-hour coding session, the teams came back to make their presentations to the judges. And the judges picked the top two winners.
Facial Recognition and Vaccination Status
Second place was awarded to the A-Team, a team consisting of just one person! Augustine Correa from Mumbai utilized two Auth0 Actions: Yoonik, the Face Authentication Action found in the Auth0 marketplace, and a custom one built by the team during the Hackathon named “Vaccination Status.” This action was designed to interface with India’s COVID19 vaccination portal and verify the vaccination status of the person logging in.
India is enforcing vaccine mandates for entry to enclosed physical spaces. The A-Team’s Login Flow solution ascertains a registrant’s vaccination status and ensures the integrity of the process with a non-contact biometric authentication.
“For app developers, Auth0 Actions has a comforting familiarity with our current software practices,” reflected Augustin. “While we channel our efforts to code the unique functionality of our app, we incorporate packages for everything else. This assembly of components enables rapid development of high-quality software.”
Authenticate Your VPN at Login
The winners of the Auth0 Hackathon were Knights of the Pass, composed of Inna Shablygin, Kirill Kotyagin, Rostislav Kondratenko, and Igor Vladimirskiy. The Knights of the Pass designed an Auth0 Login flow that streamlines access to corporate resources by recognizing authorization at login for access to VPN.
VPN is a widely-used security tool for remote workers but often creates significant inconvenience for users and systems administrators alike, contributing to productivity and compromised security.
The Knights of the Pass team created an Auth0 application for their test demo and set up a reverse proxy that restricts access to the application from the Internet (e.g., only the login page of the app is exposed). Next, they created an Auth0 action that generates one-time tickets for VPN authentication when the user is being logged in. These tickets are later verified by the RADIUS server. Lastly, their Action displays a webpage in the middle of the login process. The webpage verifies if the user is currently in the corporate network and, if not, starts the VPN client software on the user machine to connect to VPN.
“Companies which utilize Auth0 identity management with WWPass passwordless authentication can use Auth0 Actions to streamline access to corporate resources,” said Inna Shablygin, VP of Operations at WWPass. “Protected by corporate VPN, with extremely transparent and simple user experience, Auth0 Actions is a fantastic tool to glue different pieces of technology together.”
Want to Know More?
To learn more about how to use Actions in an Auth0 login flow, check out our docs section to see how to use Actions in your customer flow.
If you’ve built an Action and think you’re ready to share it as an integration, find out more in the Auth0 Marketplace.
