What is Pomerium

Overview?

Pomerium is an identity-aware proxy that enables secure access to internal applications. Pomerium provides a standardized interface to add access control to applications regardless of whether the application itself has authorization or authentication baked-in. Pomerium gateways both internal and external requests, and can be used in situations where you'd typically reach for a VPN.

Pomerium can be used to:

• provide a single-sign-on gateway to internal applications.
• enforce dynamic access policy based on context, identity, and device state.
• aggregate access logs and telemetry data.
• perform delegated user authorization for service-based authorization systems:
  • Istio
  • Google Cloud
• provide unified identity attestation for upstream services:
  • Kubernetes
  • Grafana
  • Custom applications
• provide a VPN alternative.

Demo

To make this a bit more concrete, click the image thumbnail to see a short youtube demo:

(opens new window)

The above video shows the flow for both an unauthorized and authorized user.

1. An unauthorized user authenticates with their corporate single-sign-on provider.
2. The unauthorized user is blocked from a protected resource.
3. The unauthorized user signs out from their session.
4. An authorized user authenticates with their corporate single-sign-on provider.
5. Pomerium delegating and granting access to the requested resource.
6. The authorized user inspecting their user details including group membership.