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

Chapter 12: Managing Tokens and Sessions

In addition to acting as a centralized authentication and authorization service, Keycloak is, at its core, a session and token management system.

As part of the authentication process, Keycloak may create server-side sessions and correlate them with tokens. By relying on these sessions, Keycloak is able to keep the state of the authentication context where sessions originated, track users' and clients' activity, check the validity of tokens, and decide when users and clients should re-authenticate.

In this chapter, we are going to look at how Keycloak allows you to manage tokens and their underlying sessions, as well as understanding the different aspects that you should be aware of when doing so. For that, we are going to cover the following topics:

  • Managing sessions
  • Managing tokens