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

Authenticating users with OpenID Connect

While OAuth 2.0 is a protocol for authorization, it does not cover authentication. OpenID Connect builds on top of OAuth 2.0 to add an authentication layer.

At the heart of OpenID Connect sits the OpenID Connect Core specification, which has enabled a whole ecosystem of websites to no longer need to deal with user management and authenticating users. In addition, it has significantly reduced the number of times a user has to authenticate, as well as the number of different passwords a user has to juggle, that is, if they care about using unique passwords for all websites they access. Just think about the endless number of websites that allow you to sign in using Google, or other social networks. I'm highlighting Google rather than other social networks here due to the fact that they are actually implementing OpenID Connect properly, which makes it incredibly easy to add sign-on with Google, compared to some other sites that have done...