Book Image

Keycloak - Identity and Access Management for Modern Applications

By : Stian Thorgersen, Pedro Igor Silva
Book Image

Keycloak - Identity and Access Management for Modern Applications

By: Stian Thorgersen, Pedro Igor Silva

Overview of this book

Implementing authentication and authorization for applications can be a daunting experience, often leaving them exposed to security vulnerabilities. Keycloak is an open-source solution for identity management and access management for modern applications, which can make a world of difference if you learn how to use it. Keycloak, helping you get started with using it and securing your applications. Complete with hands-on tutorials, best practices, and self-assessment questions, this easy-to-follow guide will show you how to secure a sample application and then move on to securing different application types. As you progress, you will understand how to configure and manage Keycloak as well as how to leverage some of its more advanced capabilities. Finally, you'll gain insights into securely using Keycloak in production. By the end of this book, you will have learned how to install and manage Keycloak as well as how to secure new and existing applications.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Section 1: Getting Started with Keycloak
4
Section 2: Securing Applications with Keycloak
11
Section 3: Configuring and Managing Keycloak
17
Section 4: Security Considerations

Using Web Authentication (WebAuthn)

The WebAuthn protocol aims to improve the security and usability of authenticating users over the internet. For that, it provides additional capabilities for server and security devices to communicate with each other – using the browser as an intermediary – to authenticate users using a cryptography protocol.

WebAuthn is based on asymmetric keys – a private-public key pair – to securely register users' devices and authenticate them in a system. There is no shared key between devices and the server, only a public key. By acting as an intermediary between security devices and the server, WebAuthn makes it possible to use these devices for 2FA, MFA using biometrics, or to seamlessly authenticate users without any explicit credentials other than their security devices: a concept also known as username-less and password-less authentication.

When used for 2FA, WebAuthn is a more secure method than OTP because there...