Book Image

Cloud Identity Patterns and Strategies

By : Giuseppe Di Federico, Fabrizio Barcaroli
5 (1)
Book Image

Cloud Identity Patterns and Strategies

5 (1)
By: Giuseppe Di Federico, Fabrizio Barcaroli

Overview of this book

Identity is paramount for every architecture design, making it crucial for enterprise and solutions architects to understand the benefits and pitfalls of implementing identity patterns. However, information on cloud identity patterns is generally scattered across different sources and rarely approached from an architect’s perspective, and this is what Cloud Identity Patterns and Strategies aims to solve, empowering solutions architects to take an active part in implementing identity solutions. Throughout this book, you’ll cover various theoretical topics along with practical examples that follow the implementation of a standard de facto identity provider (IdP) in an enterprise, such as Azure Active Directory. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll explore the different factors that contribute to an enterprise's current status quo around identities and harness modern authentication approaches to meet specific requirements of an enterprise. You’ll also be able to make sense of how modern application designs are impacted by the company’s choices and move on to recognize how a healthy organization tackles identity and critical tasks that the development teams pivot on. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to breeze through creating portable, robust, and reliable applications that can interact with each other.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Part 1: Impact of Digital Transformation
4
Part 2: OAuth Implementation and Patterns
8
Part 3: Real-World Scenarios

How OAuth and OIDC work together

Despite OAuth being commonly used together with OIDC to cover both authentication and authorization requirements, it is not mandatory for them to be used together. Just to provide an example, OAuth can be used for authorization even in contexts where another protocol (for example, the SAML protocol, described in the Security Assertion Markup Language section in Chapter 1, Walkthrough of Digital Identity in the Enterprise) is used for authentication. As a matter of fact, the specification of OAuth does not include OIDC, which can be seen as an optional layer to add.

Let’s use a concrete example to better understand the usage of the OAuth protocol without any authentication flow. OAuth is the protocol that is used by Facebook when a user needs to access a third-party application (for example, Spotify) with their Facebook account. In this context, the user is usually already logged in to the Facebook platform and they are just prompted to grant...