Authenticating Users

In the previous chapters, you learned how to manage users. You also walked through examples that involved users authenticating in Keycloak. By now, you should be aware of how easy it is to set up Keycloak to promptly authenticate your users, but there is much more to authentication than just using a login page and asking users for passwords.

Keycloak has a set of well-defined flows representing how end users and clients – the actors – interact with the server when authenticating to a realm. For end users, these flows usually involve using the browser as an intermediary, and for clients, the steps are based on backchannel requests to the token endpoint.

As you learned in the previous chapters, the end users authenticating to a realm are presented with a login page. From this page, users can start different interactive flows with the server in order to:

• Self-register to the realm
• Authenticate
• Reset their password
...