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

Configuring a database

Keycloak relies on a single database to store all its data. Even when running multiple instances of Keycloak, all of them will be talking to the same database. A database is crucial for the overall performance, availability, scalability, reliability, and integrity of Keycloak. Although Keycloak provides a cache layer to avoid database hits as much as possible, a good database will help to make the system behave better when data needs to be loaded from the database.

By default, Keycloak is configured with a very simple H2 database that should not be used in production, by any means. Instead, you should configure a more robust database such as the following:

  • MariaDB 10.1.19
  • MariaDB Galera 10.1.19
  • MySQL 8.0
  • Oracle 19c RAC
  • Microsoft SQL Server 2017
  • PostgreSQL 11.5

The preceding list is the official list of supported databases and their versions.

Note

At the time this book was written, the Keycloak version was 13.0.0. The...