I am recently working on Keycloak 6.0.1 for SSO for authentication for multiple applications in organisation. I am confused in difference between clients and realm.
If I have 5 different application to be managed for SSO then do I have to create 5 different clients or 5 different realm ?
If I say I have to create 5 different Clients under 1 realm then could I execute different authentication flow for different client in same realm ?
According to Keycloak documentation
Realm - A realm manages a set of users, credentials, roles, and groups. A user belongs to and logs into a realm. Realms are isolated from one another and can only manage and authenticate the users that they control.
Clients are entities that can request Keycloak to authenticate a user. Most often, clients are applications and services that want to use Keycloak to secure themselves and provide a single sign-on solution. Clients can also be entities that just want to request identity information or an access token so that they can securely invoke other services on the network that are secured by Keycloak.
For your scenario you can create 5 different clients under one realm. Keycloak provides out of the box support for Single Sign On. For more information refer to Keycloak documentation keycloak documentation link
The core concept in Keycloak is a Realm. A realm secures and manages
security metadata for a set of users, applications, and registered
oauth clients. Users can be created within a specific realm within the
Administration console. Roles (permission types) can be defined at
the realm level and you can also set up user role mappings to assign
these permissions to specific users.
http://www.mastertheboss.com/jboss-frameworks/keycloak/introduction-to-keycloak
Generally talking, a client represents a resource which some users can access.
Keycloak's built in clients are for keycloak internal use.
Example for an application could be any mobile application. Client can be a simple REST API.
Related
I have an old windows application written in VB.NET with SQL server backend. Currently the new user additions, deletion, adding entitlements etc. are managed by an old approval workflow system. After getting approvals, the user details and entitlements are inserted in to the SQL server database table manually.
I am trying to integrate this application with the SailPoint's Identity and access management. So the new user addition, deletion update and adding entitlements etc will be done through Sailpoint. For this, I would require to create a WEB API which can be called by Sailpoint and expose the functionalities(add user/delete user/add entitlements). The only consumer to this API is SailPoint.
I am new to OAuth and below are the grant types that I came across. But not sure which one I should be using in this particular scenario.
1.Implicit Grant
2.Resource Owner Password Credentials Grant
3.Client Credentials Grant
4.Authorization Code Grant
I have done research on the different authentication methods that we can use to secure the web api. But still confused on which one to apply in this scenario as this new web api is going to be made available in internet.
I already tried developing a POC with the OAuth 2.0 with password grant type referring this article. But when I read articles in the internet I found that the password grant type is not that secure and is deprecated.
Could you please advise on which grant type(client credentials/authorization code/implicit) to use in this scenario. I believe authorization code is used when the user is directly trying to access the API. In this scenario, SailPoint will be calling the API in the backend programmatically when they insert a new user in their UI.
I think it's a good approach to use client credentials in this case because the communication between IIQ and your Web API can be considered an API-to-API communication, I mean, IIQ is acting on behalf of itself in this communication.
See this article for more details - https://dzone.com/articles/four-most-used-rest-api-authentication-methods (bold part by myself)
OAuth 2.0 provides several popular flows suitable for different types
of API clients:
Authorization code — The most common flow, it is mostly used for
server-side and mobile web applications. This flow is similar to how
users sign up into a web application using their Facebook or Google
account.
Implicit — This flow requires the client to retrieve an
access token directly. It is useful in cases when the user’s
credentials cannot be stored in the client code because they can be
easily accessed by the third party. It is suitable for web, desktop,
and mobile applications that do not include any server component.
Resource owner password — Requires logging in with a username and
password. In that case, the credentials will be a part of the request.
This flow is suitable only for trusted clients (for example, official
applications released by the API provider).
Client Credentials —
Intended for the server-to-server authentication, this flow describes
an approach when the client application acts on its own behalf rather
than on behalf of any individual user. In most scenarios, this flow
provides the means to allow users to specify their credentials in the
client application, so it can access the resources under the client’s
control.
How do I best configure Keycloak so that a user needs to have an account for a client to be able to login into that client?
I have to replace a proprietory SSO-Impl. It deals with users, roles and clients much like Keycloak. However, it also knows about accounts. A user is only allowed to login to a client if he has an account for that client.
In Keycloak, if a user simply exists in a realm he may login to a client of that realm. Nothing else is needed. So no "account" is needed. In the old application, he needs an account as well.
What functionality in Keycloak is best suited to overcome this difference?
I have one idea:
Create a client-role in each client namend "HasAccount" and assign it to users. Then, restrict access if that role is missing.
This is discussed here: "Restrict client access in a single realm with keycloak"
It has at least two drawbacks:
It mixes authentication and authorization in the legacy app. I can understand that. But creating a role was already a workaround. That is why I described my initial problem here.
I have clients in 3+ languages/technologies. Adding functionality there seems like more work than in Keycloak.
Last remark:
Before you ask "This is not single sign on" anymore. It is only for administrative purposes. The admin can allow users to login into a client or not by creating an account or not. The user does not have to login a second time. If he is logged in in App A and has an account for App B, accessing App B works without logging in there.
A user is only allowed to login to a client if he has an account for that client. is really not a task for Identity Provider (IdP). It provides only identity and not authorization.
Of course you can ignore that and implement authorization as well. See: User attribute based web service access control by Keycloak
From the design perspective I would add auth reverse proxy in front of legacy app (but it isn't a best solution for SPA apps). Auth proxy will provide authentication via OIDC protocol and also authorization. Legacy apps may keep own OIDC authentication - it will be seamless auth from the user perspective, because SSO will be used.
Account entity - you can use group entity in the Keycloak instead of original account.
Let's say you have a web service with many OAuth2/OpenID Connect clients that supports regular 3 legged OAuth.
Users of this service (resource owners) would also like to be able to select clients to grant OAuth permissions to from within the service itself.. For example, by checking a series of checkboxes.
There appears to be no standard way of doing this. As in, there is no defined way of (a) kicking off an OAuth flow from the resource server or (b) sharing already generated authorization codes and/or tokens with clients.
Is there a standard I've missed? Do other services do this? What's the best way to achieve this goal?
User Managed Access provides such a solution.
"A typical example is the following: a web user (an end-user resource owner) can authorize a web or native app (a client) to gain one-time or ongoing access to a protected resource containing his home address stored at a "personal data store" service (a resource server), by telling the resource server to respect access entitlements issued by his chosen cloud-based authorization service (an authorization server)."
I am working on a server with a legacy user set and user roles. The server exposes a REST API which use a gross set of roles to authenticate with.
The owners now want to move to a new authentication scheme and OpenID Connect seems like a good fit, due to there being a requirement to identify users. Also the authentication server has to run in a cluster ( there's reasons! )
My question is, is it possible to sync the existing roles on the server to an OpenID container so that any client asking for access to those roles can be authenticated?
I've followed the instructions in this post http://mobile.awsblog.com/post/Tx371Y7CA0QJ95X/Simplifying-Token-Vending-Machine-Deployment-with-AWS-CloudFormation
And I can see that it's working somewhat, and i understand the overall concept of what TVM is and why it's needed, however I still have hard time understanding how this works in practicality. I read a post somewhere that anonymous token vending machine is designed for read-only and if I wanted to actually provide write access I need to use identity TVM.
In the demo app it makes me register my account on the cloudformation server i set up, but I don't understand how this works with say my own web app. I have a mobile app that connects to rails app where I need users to upload their profile images as well as post photo content. I already have the app running except for the integration part with the TVM (basically my aws credentials are embedded in the app which Amazon doesn't recommend)
So my question is how do i integrate an existing REST based iOS app with identity token vending machine to upload photos to S3? How can i integrate it without making users separately create an "account" for the identity token vending machine on top of registering for my app?
We recently launched Amazon Cognito, which obviates the need for the TVM in many cases, particularly in the "anonymous TVM" case. Through Cognito's unauthenticated access you can grant users of your application limited access privileges to various AWS resources. Cognito leverages existing functionality of IAM Roles and STS to deliver these credentials.
If you want to maintain the integration with your existing backend authentication solution, you will need to generate and maintain the list of identity ids for your application. You can read more about the APIs involved in our API documentation.
Your app can act as the TVM, mapping your user identities to the IAM Roles with the permissions they need. Then can use the AssumeRole calls on STS to create temporary credentials for these users. Your app then creates a S3Client object with these credentials and use it to upload the photo.
See the "Identity federation" and "Web identity federation" sections of the of IAM Roles documentation
The AWS Web Identity Federation Playground is a nice example app to see it at work.
CoudFormation will automate the creation, updates and deletion of AWS Resources, including EC2 Instances and IAM Roles, but will not be directly related to the user authentication.