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 ABAC

When users authenticate through Keycloak, tokens issued by the server contain important information about the authentication context. Tokens contain information about the authenticated user and the client to which tokens were issued, as well as any other information that can be gathered during the authentication process. With that in mind, any information carried by a token can be used to authorize access to your applications. They are just claims mapped to tokens.

ABAC involves using the different attributes associated with an identity (represented by a token), as well as information about the authentication context, to enforce access to resources. It is probably the most flexible access control mechanism you can choose, with natural support for fine-grained authorization. Together with token-based authorization, applications using Keycloak can easily enable ABAC to protect their resources.

Token-based authorization is based on introspecting tokens and using the information...