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 6

  1. As an SPA is running in the browser, it cannot use a confidential client directly, which results in a greater risk if a refresh token is leaked. For this reason, it is more secure to have a backend running in a web server that can use a confidential client and store tokens on the server side.
  2. No, any type of application can use OAuth 2.0 through an external user agent to obtain an access token, and many different types of services have support for bearer tokens.
  3. An application should never collect user credentials directly as this increases the chance of credentials being leaked, and provides the application with full access to the user account. For this reason, native and mobile applications should use an external user agent to authenticate with Keycloak.