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

The authorization code grant flow with PKCE

PKCE is a more secure variation of the authorization code grant flow that was mainly introduced for SPAs. It was introduced to mitigate the authorization code interception attack, which aims to steal the authorization code from a legitimate application in order to obtain an access token.

Let’s see how this flow works:

Figure 4.3 – PKCE

The flow is explained in detail as follows:

  1. The client application requests an authorization code (authorization grant proof) from the /authorize endpoint of the authorization (AuthZ) server. Before sending the request, the client application generates a secret named code_verifier; it transforms it with a transformation named t_m and attaches the following to the authorization request:
    • t(code_verifier): The transformed secret
    • t_m: The transformation function
  2. The authorization server stores the transformed secret, t(code_verifier), and the transformation function...