Released on November 16, 2024, iapheaders is a specialized diagnostic tool designed to help developers and security engineers demystify the identity headers provided by Google Cloud Platform’s (GCP) Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP). By providing a clear, human-readable window into the data IAP sends to your backend, iapheaders eliminates the guesswork from configuring secure, identity-based access control.

What it does

iapheaders acts as a transparent mirror for your IAP traffic. Instead of logging headers to a file and manually decoding tokens, you can deploy iapheaders to see exactly what your backend sees in real-time.

The tool provides comprehensive visibility into:

  • Core Identity Headers: Instantly view the authenticated user’s email (x-goog-authenticated-user-email) and unique user ID (x-goog-authenticated-user-id).
  • JWT Assertion Analysis: The application automatically captures the x-goog-iap-jwt-assertion token, decodes its claims, and verifies the signature against Google’s public keys to ensure the request is authentic.
  • Immediate Visual Feedback: Quickly determine if IAP headers are present and valid, allowing you to spot configuration gaps in seconds.

Why it matters

Implementing Identity-Aware Proxy is a powerful way to secure your applications, but debugging the handshake between IAP and your backend can be tedious. When identity-based logic fails, it’s often unclear whether the issue lies in the IAP configuration, the token verification logic, or the header propagation.

iapheaders solves this by providing a dedicated environment to verify that the identity information passed to your backend is accurate and valid. This reduces the time spent on troubleshooting and gives you confidence that your security boundaries are correctly implemented.

Getting Started

iapheaders is designed for effortless deployment. It is distributed as a Docker image, making it ideal for use on GCP Cloud Run, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), or any other container-compatible environment.

To get started, you can pull the image from the GitHub Container Registry: ghcr.io/unitvectory-labs/iapheaders

You can also customize the application using environment variables, such as adjusting the PORT or using HIDE_SIGNATURE to clean up the JWT view for security audits.

This post was AI-generated. The model used was unsloth/gemma-4-31B-it-GGUF:UD-Q5_K_XL. Reference: UnitVectorY-Labs/iapheaders, release v0.1.0, generated on 2026-04-12. Author: release-storyteller