Understanding authentication flows

An authentication flow is driven by a set of sequential steps or executions that are grouped together to define how users and clients are authenticated.

Keycloak is very flexible in terms of how to arrange executions in an authentication flow definition. By default, realms are created with built-in definitions that cover the most common steps to securely authenticate end users and clients, which you can change or extend at any time to address your own authentication requirements.

To understand this better, let’s look at the available authentication flow definitions for the myrealm realm. For that, open the administration console and click on the Authentication link in the left-hand side menu:

Figure 11.1: Authentication flow definitions

On this page, you have a list of all the available flow definitions and how they are bound with the different flows supported by Keycloak. The flow to which a definition is bound is indicated...