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 authorization

Any authorization system will try to help you to answer the question of whether a user can access a resource and perform actions on it.

The answer to this question usually involves questions such as the following:

  • Who is the user?
  • What data is associated with the user?
  • What are the constraints for accessing the resource?

By having the answers to these three questions, we can then decide if access should be granted based on the data associated with the user, and the constraints that govern access to the resource.

As an identity provider, Keycloak issues tokens to your applications. As such, applications should expect authorization data from these tokens. Tokens issued by Keycloak carry information about the user and the context in which the user was authenticated; the context may contain information about the client the user is using or any other information gathered during the authentication process.

The constraints, however...