Keycloak, Open Source Identity and Access Management
I’m not a developer or software designer but as an user, I need to Single Sign-On for web applications that those made for a software solution. Some companies developing their solutions on this regard but Keycloak already developed and available as open-source software.
What’s Keycloack?
Keycloak provides user federation, strong authentication, user management, fine-grained authorization, and more.
Keycloak is an open source software product to allow single sign-on with Identity and Access Management aimed at modern applications and services. As of March 2018 this WildFly community project is under the stewardship of Red Hat who use it as the upstream project for their RH-SSO product.
Keycloack Features
Keycloack has many features that help you to provide identity and access management for your software solotions.
Single-Sign On
Users authenticate with Keycloak rather than individual applications. This means that your applications don’t have to deal with login forms, authenticating users, and storing users. Once logged-in to Keycloak, users don’t have to login again to access a different application.
This also applied to logout. Keycloak provides single-sign out, which means users only have to logout once to be logged-out of all applications that use Keycloak.
Identity Brokering and Social Login
Enabling login with social networks is easy to add through the admin console. It’s just a matter of selecting the social network you want to add. No code or changes to your application is required.
Keycloak can also authenticate users with existing OpenID Connect or SAML 2.0 Identity Providers. Again, this is just a matter of configuring the Identity Provider through the admin console.
Identity Brokering and Social Login
Enabling login with social networks is easy to add through the admin console. It’s just a matter of selecting the social network you want to add. No code or changes to your application is required.
Keycloak can also authenticate users with existing OpenID Connect or SAML 2.0 Identity Providers. Again, this is just a matter of configuring the Identity Provider through the admin console.
Admin Console
Through the admin console administrators can centrally manage all aspects of the Keycloak server.
They can enable and disable various features. They can configure identity brokering and user federation.
They can create and manage applications and services, and define fine-grained authorization policies.
They can also manage users, including permissions and sessions.
Account Management Console
Through the account management console users can manage their own accounts. They can update the profile, change passwords, and setup two-factor authentication.
Users can also manage sessions as well as view history for the account.
If you’ve enabled social login or identity brokering users can also link their accounts with additional providers to allow them to authenticate to the same account with different identity providers.
Standard Protocols
Keycloak is based on standard protocols and provides support for OpenID Connect, OAuth 2.0, and SAML.
Authorization Services
If role based authorization doesn’t cover your needs, Keycloak provides fine-grained authorization services as well. This allows you to manage permissions for all your services from the Keycloak admin console and gives you the power to define exactly the policies you need.
Which Images are Available?
Keycloack is available as Docker and Podmon containers and also it’s available for download to deploying on bare-metal.
Conclusion
Developing software solutions needs pay for hiring developers and keep under development the software solution to fix any bug and add new features. When a software solution is available as open-source, why do you need to organizing large teams to developing same solution?
If you want to do it, you are reinventing the wheel again.
