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 reverse proxy

When running in production, a reverse proxy is a key component to enable high availability. A reverse proxy provides a single and public access point for the different Keycloak instances, distributing the load across them using a set of policies. These instances are usually running in a private network so that they are only reachable through the proxy.

By distributing the load across instances, a reverse proxy helps you to scale your deployment by adding or removing more instances as needed, as well as helping to survive failures when specific nodes are failing to serve requests.

Keycloak can be used with any reverse proxy implementation so you are free to use whatever you are comfortable with. Examples of widely used reverse proxies are Apache HTTP Server, Nginx, F5, and HAProxy.

Regardless of your preference, there is a set of basic requirements that you should be aware of to use your choice with Keycloak:

  • TLS termination and re-encryption...