Cloak Authentication
Ludivina Speed
Users authenticate with Keycloak rather than individual applications. This means that your applications don't have to deal with login forms, authenticating users, and storing users. Once logged-in to Keycloak, users don't have to login again to access a different application.
If you've enabled social login or identity brokering users can also link their accounts with additional providers to allow them to authenticate to the same account with different identity providers.
If role based authorization doesn't cover your needs, Keycloak provides fine-grained authorization services as well. This allows you to manage permissions for all your services from the Keycloak admin console and gives you the power to define exactly the policies you need.
Please note: I know this question sounds similar to this one, however in that question, the issue was resolved by tailing the Keycloak logs, whereby the individual noticed a CODE_TO_TOKEN_ERROR error which ultimately led to their accepted solution. In my case, after reproducing the issue and tailing the Keycloak logs, no such error is produced, and so I believe this is simply a different root problem that bubbles to the surface with a similar "too many redirects" issue.
Spring Boot 3.X and Spring Security 6.X here, trying to use Key Cloak to handle all of my app's auth. As a successful first milestone, I'm trying to create a user in Key Cloak (including setting their password right there inside Keycloak), and then wire my Spring Boot/Security app to redirect to the Key Cloak login screen when trying to access authenticated URLs.
I then got the Key Cloak web + postgres containers running and am able to login to Key Cloak using the admin username + password that I set, and then subsequently, create a realm, a client for my app and a user:
So I feel like I'm at least partially integrated with Keycloak, there just seems to be something missing, and I'm not sure what that is. I almost feel like: (1) something is misconfigured, so (2) too many redirects are occurring between Keycloak and my app, and eventually an error is hit and it brings me to some (3) Keycloak-provided error page. Plausible?
Am I missing some configuration(s) on the Keycloak side? I would have expected it to authenticate me and redirect me to :9200/fizzes/home. Do I need to add or change any configurations in Spring Security?
We have installed rancher with docker on a single node with this image (since it was the last wan one tested as reported in the github issue). We have filled the keycloak OIDC form but when trying to connect we get this error:
I am quite new to using key cloak and end up in a puzzle. I want to know how I can do machine to machine logins without browser flow in key cloak. I am searching all over internet past 20 days but still no clue to how I can config the machine to machine login key cloak without browser flows.
Broker A
- I created a client as OpenID Connect (redirect URL to TEST API)
- Create an IDP provider and it use the client as OpenID connect (which is created in IDP B)
IDP B
- Created a client as OpenID Connect
- This client have a user
Enabling authentication and authorization involves complex functionality beyond a simple login API. In a previous article, I described the Keycloak REST login API endpoint, which only handles some authentication tasks. In this article, I describe how to enable other aspects of authentication and authorization by using Keycloak REST API functionality out of the box.
But first, what is the difference between authentication and authorization? Simply stated, authentication means who you are, while authorization means what can you do, with each approach using separate methods for validation. For example, authentication uses the user management and login form, and authorization uses role-based access control (RBAC) or an access control list (ACL).
To better understand using Keycloak for authentication and authorization, let's start with a simple case study. Suppose that Indonesia's Ministry of Education is planning to create a single sign-on integration with multiple schools. They plan to maintain their students' and teachers' single account IDs across multiple schools using a centralized platform. This lets each user have the same role, but with different access and privileges at each school, as shown in Figure 1.
Click Add Role to create two separate roles for this realm called "teacher" and "student." These new roles will then appear in the Realm Roles tab as shown in Figure 4.
On the jakarta-school details page, select Mappers and then Create Protocol Mappers, and set mappers to display the client roles on the Userinfo API, as shown in Figure 11:
Now I want to demonstrate how to develop a very simple Java application. This application connects to your Keycloak instances and uses Keycloak's authentication and authorization capability through its REST API.
After that, and most importantly, your next task is to develop the integration code; several Keycloak APIs are involved in this action. Note that I did not go into detail about the Keycloak login API as it is already described in my previous article.
First, I want to point out that, for logging out, it's critical that you use your refresh_token parameter and not access_token. Now, use the API to check for whether a bearer token is valid and active or not, in order to validate whether a request is bringing a valid credential.
For authorization, you can use two approaches to decide whether a given role is eligible to access a specific API. The first approach is to determine what role a bearer token brings by verifying it against Keycloak's userinfo API, and the next approach is to validate a role within the bearer token.
As you can see, there is a roles tag there and one approach is to validate the access right based on that. The drawback is the multiple roundtrip request between your application and Keycloak for each request, which results in higher latency.
Another approach is to read the contents of the JWT token, which are sent through each request. In order to successfully decode your JWT token, you must know what public key is used for signing it. That's why Keycloak provides a JWKS endpoint. You can view its content by using the curl command, as shown in the following sample:
Note that, in the previous sample, kid means key id, alg is the algorithm, and n is the public key used for this realm. You can use this public key to easily decode our JWT token, and read roles from the JWT claim. The sample decoded JWT token is shown next:
The best part of this approach is that you can place the public key from Keycloak in a cache, which reduces the round-trip request, and this practice eventually increases application latency and performance. The full code for this article can be found in my GitHub repository.
In conclusion, I prepared this article first to explain that enabling authentication and authorization involves complex functionality, beyond just a simple login API. Then I demonstrated how to enable many aspects of authentication and authorization using Keycloak REST API functionality out of the box.
This short guide provides a developer's introduction to software supply chain security, including the key principles, tools, and techniques you need to know to better audit and act on vulnerabilities in open source software components.
Teamsync is a feature that allows you to map groups from your identity provider to Grafana teams. This is useful if you want to give your users access to specific dashboards or folders based on their group membership.
To enable teamsync, you need to add a groups mapper to the client configuration in Keycloak.This will add the groups claim to the id_token. You can then use the groups claim to map groups to teams in Grafana.
If you use nested groups containing special characters such as quotes or colons, the JMESPath parser can perform a harmless reverse function so Grafana can properly evaluate nested groups. The following example shows a parent group named Global with nested group department that contains a list of groups:
When a user logs in using an OAuth provider, Grafana verifies that the access token has not expired. When an access token expires, Grafana uses the provided refresh token (if any exists) to obtain a new access token.
Wonder what your thoughts are of implementing something like a server-side User-Agent that uses an API key like a user+password pair to authenticate with Keycloak. I think then Keycloak would have to be extended using the Authentication SPI, maybe?
Thanks for asking! More about the setup: these users are already users on keycloak, and have rights to some resources on a resource server. They normally access the resources through a web frontend, but we want to grant these same users programmatic access to the same resources. Regardless of whether they access the resources programmatically (over API) or through the web GUI, they should have the same permissions to all the resources.
A public client in Keycloak with Direct Access Grants enabled allows your user to exchange a client_id, username, password and grant_type=password for a token with curl.
With that token you can access your API with curl the same way you would do with you web GUI.
This way there is no need to give out client secrets.
Have you tried this out already?
One other alternative would be to provide a client side library or a boilerplate two liner to let them exchange their username and password for a token, when they then pass into, say, the python requests library, but then it sort of fosters a bad practice of putting credentials in code. Of course they should be using environment variables and stuff but that might be quite a lot for someone unfamiliar to programmatic access.
Hi @Sara, Thanks. I am glad it helps. You mean like securing a node.js app using keycloak ? or extending keycloak to communicate with a node.js app ? If you want you can open an issue with more details on the github repo mentionned above, and I will try to add an example.
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