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

Requiring user consent

When an application wants access to a third-party service on behalf of a user, the user will usually be asked whether they want to grant access to the application. Without this step, a user would not know what kind of access the application is getting, and if the user is already authenticated with the authorization server, the user may not even observe the application getting access.

In Keycloak, applications can be configured to either require consent or to not require consent. For an external application you should always require consent, but for an application you know and trust, you may choose to not require consent, which in essence means that you as an admin are trusting the application and are granting it access on behalf of users.

To try this out yourself, open the Keycloak admin console and navigate to the oauth-playground client. Then, turn on the Consent Required option, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 5.5 ...