Reader small image

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

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

Pedro Igor Silva
Pedro Igor Silva
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

View More author details
Right arrow

Using Keycloak as a centralized authorization server

So far, you have been presented with authorization strategies that rely on a specific access control mechanism. Except for ABAC, these strategies rely on a specific set of data about the user to enforce access to applications. In addition to that, these strategies are tightly coupled with your applications; changes to your security requirements would require changes in your application code.

As an example, suppose you have the following pseudo-code in your application:

If (User.hasRole("manager") {
     // can access the protected resource
}

In the preceding code, we have a quite simple check using RBAC where only users granted a manager role can access a protected resource. What would happen if your requirements changed and you also needed to give access to that same resource to a specific user? Or even grant access to that resource for users granted some other role? Or perhaps leverage ABAC to look at the...

lock icon
The rest of the page is locked
Previous PageNext Page
You have been reading a chapter from
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