Keycloak VS OPA (Open Policy Agent)

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...

You couldn't pay me to use their bullshit...if you need an identity server/provider go with Keycloak. Open source, free, and standards based, works better and scales better too.

#docker-compose.yml version: '3' volumes: postgres_data: driver: local services: postgres: container_name: postgres image: postgres:15-alpine restart: unless-stopped volumes: - postgres_data:/var/lib/postgresql/data - ./init/db:/docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/ command: postgres -c wal_level=logical ports: - '5433:5432' environment: POSTGRES_DB: ${POSTGRES_DB} POSTGRES_USER: ${POSTGRES_USER} POSTGRES_PASSWORD: ${POSTGRES_PASSWORD} hasura: container_name: hasura image: hasura/graphql-engine:v2.29.0 restart: unless-stopped depends_on: - postgres # - keycloak ports: - '6080:8080' volumes: - ./hasura/metadata:/hasura-metadata environment: ## postgres database to store Hasura metadata HASURA_GRAPHQL_METADATA_DATABASE_URL: postgres://${POSTGRES_USER}:${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}@postgres:5432/hasura_metadata HASURA_GRAPHQL_DATABASE_URL: postgres://${POSTGRES_USER}:${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}@postgres:5432/${POSTGRES_DB} HASURA_GRAPHQL_LOG_LEVEL: warn ## enable the console served by server HASURA_GRAPHQL_ENABLE_CONSOLE: 'true' # set to "false" to disable console ## enable debugging mode. It is recommended to disable this in production HASURA_GRAPHQL_DEV_MODE: 'true' HASURA_GRAPHQL_ENABLED_LOG_TYPES: startup, http-log, webhook-log, websocket-log, query-log ## enable jwt secret when keycloak realm is ready # HASURA_GRAPHQL_JWT_SECRET: '{ "type": "RS256", "jwk_url": "http://keycloak:8080/realms/development/protocol/openid-connect/certs" }' HASURA_GRAPHQL_ADMIN_SECRET: ${HASURA_GRAPHQL_ADMIN_SECRET} HASURA_GRAPHQL_UNAUTHORIZED_ROLE: anonymous HASURA_GRAPHQL_ENABLE_REMOTE_SCHEMA_PERMISSIONS: 'true' HASURA_GRAPHQL_MIGRATIONS_SERVER_TIMEOUT: 30 # To view tables in Postgres # pgweb: # container_name: pgweb # image: sosedoff/pgweb:latest # restart: unless-stopped # ports: # - '8081:8081' # environment: # - DATABASE_URL=postgres://${POSTGRES_USER}:${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}@postgres:5432/${POSTGRES_DB}?sslmode=disable # depends_on: # - postgres keycloak: container_name: keycloak image: quay.io/keycloak/keycloak:22.0.5 command: ['start-dev'] # Uncomment following if you want to import realm configuration on start up # command: ['start-dev', '--import-realm'] environment: ## https://www.keycloak.org/server/all-config KEYCLOAK_ADMIN: admin KEYCLOAK_ADMIN_PASSWORD: password123 KC_DB: postgres KC_DB_PASSWORD: postgres_pass KC_DB_USERNAME: postgres KC_DB_SCHEMA: public KC_DB_URL: jdbc:postgresql://postgres:5432/keycloak_db KC_HOSTNAME: localhost ports: - 8090:8080 depends_on: - postgres # Uncomment following if you want to import realm configuration on start up # volumes: # - ./realm-export.json:/opt/keycloak/data/import/realm.json:ro

How can we handle this? Are there any mechanisms to prevent or at least to some extent safeguard this kind of issues without falling back to a manual workflow? There is. One huge advantage of sticking to (de-facto) standards like Terraform is that first we are probably not the first ones to come up with this question and second there is a huge ecosystem around Terraform that might help us with such challenges. And for this specific scenario the solution is the Open Policy Agent. Let us take a closer look how the solution could look like.

A popular Policy-as-Code tool for Terraform is OPA, everyone's favorite versatile open-source policy engine that enforces security and compliance policies across your cloud-native stack, making it easier to manage and maintain consistent policy enforcement in complex, multi-service environments.

Harness Policy As Code uses Open Policy Agent (OPA) as the central service to store and enforce policies for the different entities and processes across the Harness platform. In this section, you will define a policy that will deny a pipeline execution if there is no approval step defined in a deployment stage.

OPA: While OPA is an open-source, general-purpose policy engine capable of enforcing unified and context-aware policies throughout the stack, it can also accept and output data in formats such as JSON, effectively functioning as a tool for generating or modifying configurations. Although it does not provide out-of-the-box schema definition support, it allows the integration of JsonSchema definitions.

In essence, container image signing involves adding a digital stamp to an image, affirming its authenticity. This digital assurance guarantees that the image is unchanged from creation to deployment. In this blog, I'll explain how to sign container images for Kubernetes using Cosign and the Open Policy Agent. I will also share a tutorial that demonstrates these concepts.

In this post we will explores two powerful solutions for addressing this issue: the Open Policy Language (OPA) and Google’s Zanzibar.

Rego is a declarative query language from the makers of the Open Policy Agent (OPA) framework. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) accepted OPA as an incubation-level hosted project in April 2019, and OPA graduated from incubating status in 2021.

Now there are more subdivided practice: * Policy as Code: Sentinel, OPA * Database as Code: bytebase * AppConfiguration as Code: KusionStack, Acorn * ...... (Welcome to add more)