Managing Users

In the previous chapters, you learned how to deploy, run, and use Keycloak to authenticate and authorize users in your applications. You also learned how to manage users in Keycloak to run some of the examples in this book.

In this chapter, we are going to take a closer look at the capabilities provided by Keycloak that are related to identity management and federation, such as how users are created and managed, how users can manage their own accounts, how to manage credentials, and how to integrate with different identity stores and identity providers to authenticate users and fetch their information through open protocols such as OpenID Connect, Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Managing local users
• Integrating with LDAP and Active Directory
• Integrating with social identity providers
• Integrating with third-party identity...

Technical requirements

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Managing local users

In the previous chapters, you had to create users in Keycloak to run some of the examples provided in this book. In this section, we are going to deep-dive into some key capabilities provided by Keycloak to manage your users once they are stored in Keycloak’s internal database. From now on, whenever you read about a local user, you can think of it as a user stored in a Keycloak database.

As an identity management solution, Keycloak gives you several capabilities to manage user identities. In this section, we will look at the following topics:

• How to create users
• How to manage user credentials
• How to obtain and validate user information
• How to enable user self-registration
• How to extend user information using attributes

In the next section, we are going to start our journey by looking at how to create a local user in Keycloak.

Creating a local user

To create a new user in Keycloak, click on the Users...

Integrating with LDAP and Active Directory

Many organizations still use an LDAP directory as their single source of truth for digital identities. Keycloak allows you to integrate with different LDAP server implementations so that you can leverage your existing security infrastructure and use all the authentication and authorization capabilities provided by Keycloak.

Keycloak can integrate using LDAP in different ways; it can act as a stateful broker where data from your LDAP directory is imported into the Keycloak database, as well as kept in sync with your LDAP directory, or it can act as a stateless broker delegating credential verification to your LDAP directory. You should also be able to set up multiple LDAP directories within a single realm and configure a priority order that Keycloak should respect when authenticating users.

In Keycloak, the term “user federation” refers to the capability to integrate with external identity stores. LDAP is a form of user...

Integrating with third-party identity providers

Keycloak can integrate with third-party identity providers using a set of open standard protocols.

In the previous section, you learned about user federation and how to easily integrate with LDAP. Now, you are going to learn about brokering and how to leverage user federation to create cross-domain trust between Keycloak and an identity provider using standard authentication protocols, where the identity data about users is shared and used by Keycloak to create, authenticate, and authorize users.

Integration with third-party identity providers is made possible by using Keycloak as an identity broker, where Keycloak acts as an intermediary service for authenticating and replicating users from a targeted identity provider.

Identity brokering can solve different types of problems. As we will see in the next section, it can be used to integrate with social providers, as an integration point for a legacy identity and access management...

Integrating with social identity providers

A common requirement for applications that use Keycloak is the possibility to authenticate users using different social providers, such as Google, GitHub, Instagram, and Twitter.

Integration with social providers follows the same principles that you learned about in the previous section, where Keycloak acts as a broker to authenticate and exchange identity data about users using a well-known and open standard security protocol.

To integrate with a social provider, click on the Identity Providers link in the left-hand side menu.

Keycloak allows you to select from different social providers. To integrate with them, you only need to fill in some information, which you usually obtain from the social provider you are integrating with.

Let’s configure GitHub as a social provider to allow users to authenticate using their GitHub account. Firstly, make sure you have a valid GitHub account. If not, you can create one at https...

Allowing users to manage their data

In the previous sections, you learned how to manage users through the admin console as an administrator. You also learned that users can self-register in a realm. However, one of the main capabilities of Keycloak is to also allow users to manage their own accounts through a service called Keycloak account console.

The Keycloak account console is a regular application provided by Keycloak and is where users can manage their own accounts. They can also do the following:

• Update their user profile
• Update their password
• Enable second-factor authentication
• View applications, including what applications they have authenticated to
• View open sessions, including remotely signing out of other sessions

To access the account console, open http://localhost:8080/realms/myrealm/account/ in a browser. You will be redirected to a welcome page, as follows:

Figure 10.10: The Keycloak account console

To log...

Summary

In this chapter, you were presented with the main aspects of user management in Keycloak. You learned that users can be created directly in Keycloak or by integrating with different third-party identity providers and external identity stores. You also learned that Keycloak enables these integrations by leveraging open standard protocols such as OpenID Connect, SAML, and LDAP. You also learned that users are provided with capabilities to sign up for a realm, either by enabling self-registration to a realm or by integrating with a third-party provider. Finally, you learned that users can also manage their accounts through the Keycloak account console.

In the next chapter, we are going to look at how users can authenticate using different credentials, as well as how Keycloak is the perfect fit for strong authentication.

Questions

1. Can I integrate my own user database with Keycloak?
2. Does Keycloak query the LDAP directory every time the user authenticates?
3. How do I differentiate users that have been created using a third-party or social identity provider?

Further reading

For more information on the topics that were covered in this chapter, you can refer to the following links:

• Keycloak user management: https://www.keycloak.org/docs/latest/server_admin/#user-management
• Keycloak user federation: https://www.keycloak.org/docs/latest/server_admin/#_user-storage-federation
• Keycloak identity brokering: https://www.keycloak.org/docs/latest/server_admin/#_identity_broker
• Keycloak account console: https://www.keycloak.org/docs/latest/server_admin/#_account-service

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