You're reading from Keycloak - Identity and Access Management for Modern Applications Harness the power of Keycloak, OpenID Connect, and OAuth 2.0 protocols to secure applications

Product type Paperback

Published in Jun 2021

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781800562493

Length 362 pages

Edition 1st Edition

Tools

Docker

Concepts

System Administration

Authors (2):

Pedro Igor Silva

Stian Thorgersen

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Table of Contents (21) Chapters

Preface

1. Section 1: Getting Started with Keycloak

2. Chapter 1: Getting Started with Keycloak FREE CHAPTER

3. Chapter 2: Securing Your First Application

4. Section 2: Securing Applications with Keycloak

5. Chapter 3: Brief Introduction to Standards

6. Chapter 4: Authenticating Users with OpenID Connect

7. Chapter 5: Authorizing Access with OAuth 2.0

8. Chapter 6: Securing Different Application Types

9. Chapter 7: Integrating Applications with Keycloak

10. Chapter 8: Authorization Strategies

11. Section 3: Configuring and Managing Keycloak

12. Chapter 9: Configuring Keycloak for Production

13. Chapter 10: Managing Users

14. Chapter 11: Authenticating Users

15. Chapter 12: Managing Tokens and Sessions

16. Chapter 13: Extending Keycloak

17. Section 4: Security Considerations

18. Chapter 14: Securing Keycloak and Applications

19. Assessments

20. Other Books You May Enjoy

Leveraging JWT for tokens

Keycloak has leveraged JWT as the format for access tokens from the very beginning of the project. This was a very conscious decision for interoperability as well as performance reasons.

Using a standard format, which is relatively easily consumable, makes it easier to integrate with Keycloak. As JWT is based on JSON, it can also easily be parsed and understood in any programming language.

In addition, as the resource servers are now able to directly read the value of the access token, they do not always have to make a request to the OAuth 2.0 token introspection endpoint, or the OpenID Connect UserInfo endpoint. This potentially eliminates two additional requests to Keycloak for a request to the resource server, reducing latency as well as significantly reducing the number of requests to Keycloak.

JWT comes from a family of specifications known as JOSE, which stands for JavaScript Object Signing and Encryption. The related specifications are as follows...