"AuthenticationFailed" Error in Dashboard when connecting to /api/management/ using MDS EDC Connector

[smartin314]

We have a MDS EDC Connector running on our Server gaiax.example.de

Our UI-Dashboard is available at https://gaiax.example.de/dashboard and we there get multiple "Failed fetching Dashboard Page Data" Errors. When the Dashboard requests data from the Management-API (https://gaiax.example.de/api/management/) the response is always the following Error-Message:
[{"message":"Request could not be authenticated","type":"AuthenticationFailed","path":null,"invalidValue":null}]

This happens for every request to the Management-API, for example https://gaiax.example.de/api/management/edc-ui-config or https://gaiax.example.de/api/management/last-commit-info .

We set up our Connector using this template: https://github.com/Mobility-Data-Space/mobility-data-space/blob/main/templates/connector_with_traefik.yaml . Because Traefik couldn't get a certificate to authenticate, we created one by ourselves and added it to traefik:

traefik:
    image: "traefik:v2.11"
    container_name: "traefik"
    command:
      - "--api.insecure=true"
      - "--providers.docker=true"
      - "--providers.docker.exposedbydefault=false"
      - "--providers.file.directory=/configuration/"
      - "--providers.file.watch=true"
      - "--entrypoints.web.address=:80"
      - "--entrypoints.websecure.address=:443"
    ports:
      - "80:80"
      - "443:443"
      - "8080:8080"
    volumes:
      - "/var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro"
      - "./configuration/:/configuration/"

When we try to access the Management-API using curl with the API-KEY we get the same Error-Message.

[tmberthold]

Context: Was also posted here Mobility-Data-Space/mobility-data-space#32

Unfortunately, I am not familiar with the configuration used in terms of traefik.

EDC CE wise the most important setting is the EDC_API_AUTH_KEY and it's content.

Example: You set the content to EDC_API_AUTH_KEY: ApiKeyDefaultValue2 and use it in your requests as header x-api-key:ApiKeyDefaultValue2 then its EDC-wise working.

The EDC UI needs to know the set api-key and needs to have the same value in EDC_UI_MANAGEMENT_API_KEY.

[smartin314]

We found our problem, it was indeed the API-Key.
The problem is that our API-Key started with & and we therefore put quotation marks around the Key, so it looked like this:
EDC_API_AUTH_KEY: "&123456"
Without the quoatation marks we got an error from Docker. With a new API-Key only consisting of numbers and letters without any quotation marks everything works perfectly. If we add quotation marks to the API-Key in the docker-compose.yaml it doesn't work again.

A hint in the default docker-compose.yaml that quotation marks shouldn't be used and therefore the API-Key can't start with a special character may be useful that other users don't encounter the same problem :)

[tmberthold]

Thank you for sharing and finding this special case!

[tmberthold]

Update: Have added a note in the existing FAQ: https://edc-ce.docs.sovity.de/faq#how-does-the-edc-api-key-work-for-backend-and-frontend-for-api-authentication