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You're reading from  Keycloak - Identity and Access Management for Modern Applications - Second Edition

Product typeBook
Published inJul 2023
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781804616444
Edition2nd Edition
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Authors (2):
Stian Thorgersen
Stian Thorgersen
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Stian Thorgersen

Stian Thorgersen started his career at Arjuna Technologies building a cloud federation platform, years before most companies were even ready for a single-vendor public cloud. He later joined Red Hat, looking for ways to make developers' lives easier, which is where the idea of Keycloak started. In 2013, Stian co-founded the Keycloak project with another developer at Red Hat. Today, Stian is the Keycloak project lead and is also the top contributor to the project. He is still employed by Red Hat as a senior principal software engineer focusing on identity and access management, both for Red Hat and for Red Hat's customers. In his spare time, there is nothing Stian likes more than throwing his bike down the mountains of Norway.
Read more about Stian Thorgersen

Pedro Igor Silva
Pedro Igor Silva
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Pedro Igor Silva

Pedro Igor Silva is a proud dad of amazing girls. He started his career back in 2000 at an ISP, where he had his first experiences with open source projects such as FreeBSD and Linux, as well as a Java and J2EE software engineer. Since then, he has worked in different IT companies as a system engineer, system architect, and consultant. Today, Pedro Igor is a principal software engineer at Red Hat and one of the core developers of Keycloak. His main area of interest and study is now IT security, specifically in the application security and identity and access management spaces. In his non-working hours, he takes care of his planted aquariums.
Read more about Pedro Igor Silva

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Securing native and mobile applications

Securing a web application with Keycloak is more straightforward than securing a native or mobile application. Keycloak login pages are essentially a web application and it is more natural to redirect a user to a different web application when they are already within the browser.

You may be tempted to implement login pages within the application itself to collect the username and password, then leverage the OAuth 2.0 Resource Owner Password Credential grant to obtain tokens. However, this is simply something that you should not be tempted to do. As mentioned in the previous section, applications should never have direct access to the user credentials, and this approach also means you miss out on a lot of features provided by Keycloak.

To secure a native or mobile application, you should use the Authorization Code flow with the PKCE extension instead. This is more secure, and at the same time gives you the full benefits of using Keycloak.

Effectively...

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Keycloak - Identity and Access Management for Modern Applications - Second Edition
Published in: Jul 2023Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781804616444

Authors (2)

author image
Stian Thorgersen

Stian Thorgersen started his career at Arjuna Technologies building a cloud federation platform, years before most companies were even ready for a single-vendor public cloud. He later joined Red Hat, looking for ways to make developers' lives easier, which is where the idea of Keycloak started. In 2013, Stian co-founded the Keycloak project with another developer at Red Hat. Today, Stian is the Keycloak project lead and is also the top contributor to the project. He is still employed by Red Hat as a senior principal software engineer focusing on identity and access management, both for Red Hat and for Red Hat's customers. In his spare time, there is nothing Stian likes more than throwing his bike down the mountains of Norway.
Read more about Stian Thorgersen

author image
Pedro Igor Silva

Pedro Igor Silva is a proud dad of amazing girls. He started his career back in 2000 at an ISP, where he had his first experiences with open source projects such as FreeBSD and Linux, as well as a Java and J2EE software engineer. Since then, he has worked in different IT companies as a system engineer, system architect, and consultant. Today, Pedro Igor is a principal software engineer at Red Hat and one of the core developers of Keycloak. His main area of interest and study is now IT security, specifically in the application security and identity and access management spaces. In his non-working hours, he takes care of his planted aquariums.
Read more about Pedro Igor Silva