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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 REST APIs and services

When an application wants to invoke a REST API protected by Keycloak, it first obtains an access token from Keycloak, then includes the access token in the authorization header in requests it sends to the REST API:

Authorization: bearer eyJhbGciOiJSUzI1NiIsInR5c…

The REST API can then verify the access token to decide whether access should be granted.

This approach makes it easy to provide a REST API that can be leveraged by many applications, even making the REST API available as a public API on the internet for third-party applications to consume.

In Chapter 5, Authorizing Access with OAuth 2.0, we covered how the application obtains an access token from Keycloak, then includes the access token in requests it makes to REST APIs so that the REST API can verify whether access should be granted. We also covered various strategies for limiting the access provided by a specific access token, as well as how an access token is verified by the REST API...

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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