Four doors, four locks: the authentication architecture

A system with four protocol surfaces needs four deliberate auth answers, not one stretched thin. Crowkis's data plane, RESP and gRPC, takes a bearer token compared in constant time, the right primitive for high-frequency machine traffic: fast, simple, immune to timing side-channels on the comparison.

The control plane earns richer machinery, because humans and automation share it with different privileges: admin keys, hashed multi-user API keys, and sessions, with endpoints gated by role, readers read, writers mutate, admins administer. Dashboard metrics and the live feed sit behind the same gates, because operational telemetry is sensitive data wearing a graph.

flowchart LR
  subgraph IMG["crowkis/crowkis:latest"]
    B["one stripped Rust binary"]
    D["/data volume"]
    U["non-root user"]
  end
  subgraph NOT["deliberately absent"]
    N1["no Python · no PyPI"]
    N2["no package manager"]
    N3["no dependency tree"]
  end
  IMG ~~~ NOT
  style IMG fill:#fbe9e8,stroke:#d62221,stroke-width:2.5px

The binding rule ties it together: any non-loopback bind makes control-plane auth mandatory automatically, so the gap between 'deployed' and 'secured', where most real-world incidents live, doesn't exist. Local development stays frictionless on loopback; production stays locked by default.

#The bottom line

Enterprise grafts your identity provider on top via SSO/SAML/OIDC, making Okta offboarding equal Crowkis offboarding. Four doors, four locks, one rule: the easy path is the safe one.