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 GBAC

Keycloak allows you to manage groups for your realms, where users are put into groups to represent their relationship with a specific business unit in your organization (mapping your organization tree) or just group users together according to their role in your applications, as when you want to have a specific group for users that can perform administrative operations.

Usually, groups and roles are usually used interchangeably, and this causes some confusion when defining a permission model. In Keycloak, there is a clear separation between these two concepts where, different than roles, groups are meant to organize your users and to grant permissions according to the roles associated with a group.

By allowing assigning roles to groups, Keycloak makes it a lot easier to manage roles for multiple users without forcing you to grant and revoke roles for each individual user in your realm.

Groups in Keycloak are hierarchical, and when tokens are issued, you can traverse...