Keycloak - Identity and Access Management for Modern Applications: Harness the power of Keycloak, OpenID Connect, and OAuth 2.0 protocols to secure applications

This is an excellent overview of access and identity management. It describes all the standards of OAuth and OIDC and how it works in Keycloak. It helps one understand how to integrate identity in whatever cloud platform. The patterns help address it in a very cloud native method.The book further addresses authorization which has elements of art more than engineering. It covers RBAC, GBAC, and ABAC well but it could use more coverage and details to understand how to define the authorization method used.This is an excellent addition to one's technical library.

On one hand, this book is a practical and useful introduction to extending and operating Keycloak to deliver a fully-functioning IAM system specific to your needs. Keycloak is known for its flexibility, but some concepts can be a little awkward to use at first. This book helps clarify its features and extension model in a more readable (or watchable, thanks to the included video walkthroughs) and insightful way than the Keycloak documentation on its own. In this way, the book is essential reading for anyone developing against or operating Keycloak in production.On the other hand, this book is also much more than that. True to Keycloak's open roots, it helps you make sense of not just Keycloak, but also the dizzying and ever-growing identity and access management standards emerging today, applicable to any IAM system. While it does not always go into great detail here, what it covers is practical, and perfectly compliments the specifications it refers to (as well as Keycloak's features of course). I recommend reading those specs as companion material as they are mentioned. By doing so, this book becomes something truly novel–a jumping off point to a practical understanding of modern IAM, something otherwise very difficult to achieve from trying to sort through RFCs or OWASP cheatsheets alone.

A pretty easy read with just a bit more detail and better explanations than the online docs. Good examples and well organized.

I work on integrating Keycloak in our project so I have thought I have a fairly deep understanding of Keycloak and OpenId Connect in general. However I have enjoyed reading this book and learning something new and I've already opened an enhancement request in our project based on what I've read and have new ideas of how to improve our Keycloak integration going forward.Every chapter provides a good introduction to a new OpenId Connect or Keycloak concept, asks some questions at the end, links to a more advanced material for the readers to continue learning. But the main strength of this book is that it is brimming with the practical hints which one may find difficult to find elsewhere in nearly every chapter.For example, how to choose an OpenId Connect logout strategy which works best for your application ? The chapter about it offers a concise analysis of pros and cons of what is used to support the OpenId Connect logout today which I don't recall seeing elsewhere.If you build SPA then you will learn all about various approaches possible in the Securing Different Application Types. The overview of the external vs internal applications in the same chapter is very good.The Authorization Strategies chapter offers a wealth of information as well.If you work with Keycloak then you can't miss the chapters describing how to deploy it effectively and securely. I'm pretty sure many ideas described there (and indeed in other chapters as well) can be of interest to the engineers who work with the different providers. You will also find many examples showing how to integrate with Keycloak.This is a big book and this is why I was impressed seeing it not achieving its volume by simply copying various Keycloak documentation pages into it - you will find a few of those pages shown as it is important to give some picture of how Keycloak looks like and which control options it offers, but it is certainly not the focus of the book to keep moving the user from one Keycloak page to the next one througout the book.I can see a lot of thought went into helping the readers appreciate what it takes to create a production-quality OpenId Connect provider and to secure the applications with the help of such a provider.There are a few things which I'd like to see explained a bit differently though:Particularly one chapter dives into dealing with ID tokens returned with the authorization code flow, while the next one focuses on the access tokens returned as part of the same flow. But I thought having a more unified presentation of both types of tokens would be better since they are returned as part of the same flow. Perhaps an accompanying demo can be enhanced to show both types of tokens in the same application.Demoing the logout chapter recommendation would be good.I'd also like to see a bit more information about some of the advanced Keycloak features - how to encrypt the tokens, how to choose different signing algorithms or its various preview features. I'd certainly not mind seeing another chapter about its advanced options in the next edition.However, overall, I'm happy with this book.IMHO the combination of the sound security advice and practical hints makes it an essential guide not only for those who are starting to learn about OpendId Connect and Keycloak but for the experienced engineers as well.I recommend it.

Keycloak is a very powerful Identity and Access Management tool that I have been using for several years now. It is also Open Source, and that's a huge plus. The online documentation is probably not the best, so this book is a tremendous resource. Even if you set aside the entire subject of Keycloak, the information that this book contains about OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect is worth the price of the book. The authors clearly know this subject matter extremely well, and have done an amazing job breaking down the subject matter in easily understandable manner.