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

Choosing an integration architecture

There are two main integration styles, depending on where the integration code and configuration are located:

  • Embedded
  • Proxied

Integrations that are embedded into your technology stack are usually provided by a third-party library, framework, web container, or application server. In this style, your application talks directly with Keycloak and is responsible for making requests and processing OAuth2 and OpenID Connect responses. Applications using this style usually need to implement some code or provide some form of configuration to enable support for these protocols. Any setting you need to change will require you to redeploy your application:

Figure 7.1 – Embedded integration style

On the other hand, in the proxied style, there is a layer of indirection where the integration is managed by a service running in front of your application, which, in turn, relies on HTTP headers to fetch tokens or...