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

Technical background

Before diving deep into flows, it’s important to understand some basic concepts regarding the actors that participate in the authorization or authentication process. If you are familiar with other protocols, you will appreciate that the concept is not so different.

Let’s start with the basics by trying to understand what the actors, devices, and servers involved in an OAuth 2.0/OIDC flow are and what their role during the authentication and authorization process is.

These are the main parties involved in nearly all protocol exchanges. The following diagram summarizes all of them:

Figure 3.2 – OAuth/OIDC parties

The preceding diagram shows the typical parties involved in authorization/authentication flows. The following are descriptions of each of the roles reported in the diagram:

  • Resource owner: This is the entity that allows access to the final resource (the resource server). If this entity is a human...