Keycloak VS Spring Security

In this article we'll be using Keycloak to quickly augment an application with user management and SSO. We will demonstrate the integration by securing a page for logged-in users. This quickly provides a jump-off point to more complex integrations.

Keycloak, an open-source identity and access management solution, provides robust authentication and authorization services for modern applications. However, configuring Keycloak instances manually can be tedious and error-prone. In this blog post, we'll explore how to simplify Keycloak configuration using Terraform and Terragrunt, enabling infrastructure as code (IaC) practices for managing Keycloak realms, clients, users, and more.

In this article we'll be using Keycloak to secure a Vue.js Web application. We're going to leverage oidc-client-ts to integrate OIDC authentication with the Vue app. The oidc-client-ts package is a well-maintained and used library. It provides a lot of utilities for building out a fully production app.

Keycloak has been a leader in the Identity and Access Management world since its launch almost 8 years ago. It is an open-source offering under the stewardship of Red Hat

It sounds like what you're looking for is an identity provider.

A popular open source option is https://www.keycloak.org/

This application can manage your users, then you can use standards like OpenID or SAML to plug it into your application, of which there are usually many plugins to accomplish this depending on your tech stack.

KeyCloak is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project that offers enterprise IAM solutions. Keycloak emphasizes proficient enterprise authorization solutions by providing:

Outline only uses SSO for authentication. The solution when self hosting is use a private keycloak server [1]. This allows you to do email based auth.

[1] https://www.keycloak.org/

> Keycloak was good but has too much legacy for 10+ years.

I got curious, actually seems to check out and explains why it's so well documented (but also complex and oftentimes confusing):

> The first production release of Keycloak was in September 2014, with development having started about a year earlier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keycloak

https://github.com/keycloak/keycloak/releases/tag/1.0.0.Fina...

> Don't outsource either your authentication or authorization. Run it in-house.

This is hard to do, though. I hope people here will drop a lot of combinations that work for them!

Personally, for a small/medium scale project, I went with:

Keycloak: https://www.keycloak.org/

It supports various backing RDBMSes (like PostgreSQL, MariaDB/MySQL and others), allows both users that you persist in your own DB, as well as various external sources, like social login across various platforms, is an absolute pain to configure and sometimes acts in stupid ways behind a reverse proxy, but has most of the features that you might ever want, which sadly comes coupled with some complexity and an enterprise feeling.

I quite like that it offers the login/registration views that you need with redirects, as well as user management, storing roles/permissions and other custom attributes. It's on par with what you'd expect and should serve you nicely.

mod_auth_openidc: https://github.com/OpenIDC/mod_auth_openidc

This one's a certified OpenID Connect Relying Party implementation for... Apache2/httpd.

Some might worry about the performance and there are other options out there (like a module for OpenResty, which is built on top of Nginx), but when coupled with mod_md Apache makes for a great reverse proxy/ingress for my personal needs.

The benefit here is that I don't need 10 different implementations for each service/back end language that's used, I can outsource the heavy lifting to mod_auth_openidc (protected paths, needed roles/permissions, redirect URLs, token renewal and other things) and just read a few trusted headers behind the reverse proxy if further checks are needed, which is easy in all technologies.

That said, the configuration there is also hard and annoying to do, as is working with OpenID Connect in general, even though you can kind of understand why that complexity is inherent. Here's a link with some certified implementations, by the way: https://openid.net/developers/certified-openid-connect-imple...

Spring security has long had great OAuth2.0 support from both the server and client elements. Recently spring security added support for the private_key_jwt client authentication method as part of the authorization code grant flow. Spring Security GitHub ref

To be fair there were quite some unexpected surprises in the past with Spring and Kotlin (e.g. the Cachable annotation did not work with suspend functions, not all Spring security annotations were supported with coroutines), but most of them were ironed out already.

They recently updated all the examples in the javadocs if you wanna bump your Spring Security version to 5.7.3 (see here). Otherwise the reference docs all reflect the non-deprecated approach that uses SecurityFilterChain and supporting beans.

Spring Security 5.7

Since Spring Security 5.7.0-M2 the use of WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter was deprecated (link to GitHub - https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-security/issues/10822) to move to component-based security configuration.

When i start the flow, no proxy is used and even the WebClient is not used to get access token. And i get a timeout exception for that. The same issue was discussed in Github: https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-security/issues/8966

You can extract (and validate) the JWT token into the Principal by implementing the getPreAuthenticatedPrincipal method, and map the claims to user details by providing through a custom implementation of AuthenticationUserDetailsService.

Or, maybe simpler, is to create your own filter and add it after the SecurityContextPersistenceFilter. Here, just recreate the authentication token from the database, which is what token based authentication does (token based authentication has to preauthenticated authentication from the token for the actual user authentication with the user details).