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

Setting the hostname for Keycloak

Keycloak exposes different endpoints to talk with applications as well as to allow managing the server itself. These endpoints can be categorized into three main groups:

  • Frontend
  • Backend
  • Administration

The base URL for each group has an important impact on how tokens are issued and validated, on how links are created for actions that require the user to be redirected to Keycloak (for example, when resetting passwords through email links), and, most importantly, how applications will discover these endpoints when fetching the OpenID Connect Discovery document from /auth/realms/{realm-name}/.well-known/openid-configuration.

In the next topics, we will be looking into each of these groups, how to define a base URL for each one, and the impact it has on users and applications using Keycloak.

Setting the frontend URL

The frontend URL is used to infer the URL used by users and applications to access Keycloak, where the main...