Welcome to Gate Identity

Gate Identity is Verne's centralized identity and access control layer. It sits in front of every product in the Verne stack — Relay, Clockwork, and future services — acting as the single source of truth for authentication and authorization.

Instead of sprinkling authorization checks across each microservice or rebuilding login flows for the 10th time, Gate centralizes:

  • Identity (who is calling, including your end-users)
  • Tenancy (which tenant / workspace they belong to)
  • Permissions (what they are allowed to do)

What Gate solves

CapabilityDescription
B2B2C User ManagementSeamlessly manage your end-users. Gate provisions, authenticates, and stores user profiles securely.
Policy-first access controlFine-grained permissions expressed as policies that are easy to audit and evolve.
Tenant‑aware isolationEvery token and user is strictly bound to a tenant. Cross-tenant data leaks are structurally impossible.
Product‑agnosticThe same unified identity surface for your custom apps, Relay, Gate, and any future Verne services.

The Identity Model

Gate Identity recognizes three distinct types of actors to keep data perfectly isolated:

  1. Verne Admins: System administrators managing the global infrastructure.
  2. Tenants (You): Our customers who build on top of Verne services. You have API keys and access to the Verne Console.
  3. End-Users: Your customers. They interact with your applications. Gate manages their credentials and profiles, ensuring they are strictly scoped to your tenant_id.

Architecture at a glance

Gate Identity exposes a simple HTTP API that your backend, CLIs, and dashboards talk to. Under the hood, it combines a robust, hardened identity server (powered by Ory Kratos) with our custom high-speed policy engine.

For most teams, the integration surface is small:

  1. For API access: Issue a token, attach it to backend requests, and let Gate enforce access centrally.
  2. For User Auth: Forward your end-users' login/registration payloads to Gate, and we handle the secure storage, password hashing, and session management.

Quick Start

  1. Create a tenant in the Verne Console.
  2. Generate a Gate API key in Dashboard → Keys.
  3. Use that API key to:
    • Provision end-user identities via the /v1/gate/identities endpoint.
    • Obtain short‑lived access tokens for your backend via the /v1/gate/tokens endpoint.

Authentication

Every request to the Gate API must include a Bearer token in the Authorization header. Gate API keys follow a strict format so you can easily identify them in logs or environment variables:

vrn_gate_<environment>_<secret>
PrefixEnvironment
vrn_gate_test_Sandbox — safe for development, local testing, and staging.
vrn_gate_live_Production — access to live tenants, real users, and production data.

Example header:

Authorization: Bearer vrn_gate_live_sk_9f8a7...

Tokens are scoped to a single tenant and environment, and can be instantly rotated from the Dashboard → Keys page.