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

Understanding Service Provider Interfaces

If you are already familiar with the Java language, you probably know what an SPI is. If not, think about it as a pluggable mechanism for adding or changing behavior to an extensible Java application without changing its code base.

Keycloak is built with extensibility in mind where features are implemented using a set of well-defined interfaces. Features such as the ability to authenticate users using different authentication mechanisms, auditing, integration with legacy systems for fetching identity data, map claims into tokens, register new users and update their profiles, and to integrate with third-party identity providers are all backed by a set of service interfaces and a corresponding SPI. The same is also true for core features, such as caching, storage, or the different security protocols supported by Keycloak, although for those, you would hardly have a need to customize:

Figure 13.1 – Keycloak Service...