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

Using a reverse proxy

By running in front of your application, you can use reverse proxies to add additional capabilities to your application. The most common proxies provide support for OpenID Connect where enabling authentication is a matter of changing the proxy configuration.

Whether using a proxy is better than having the integration code and configuration within your application really depends on the use case and, depending on the circumstances, it might be your only option or the option that will save you precious time from implementing your own integration code, even if you have a library available for the technology stack your application is using.

Nowadays, OpenID Connect and OAuth2 support is a mandatory capability for proxies, and you find support for these protocols in most of them, regardless of whether they're open source or proprietary. As an example, two of the most popular proxies, Apache HTTP Server and Nginx, provide the necessary extensions for these...