Keycloak is an
open-source software
Open-source software (OSS) is Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...
product to allow
single sign-on with
identity and access management aimed at modern applications and services. Until April 2023, this
WildFly community project was under the stewardship of
Red Hat
Red Hat, Inc. (formerly Red Hat Software, Inc.) is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises and is a subsidiary of IBM. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North ...
, who use it as the
upstream project for their
Red Hat build of Keycloak. In April 2023, Keycloak was donated to the
CNCF and joined the foundation as an incubating project.
Keycloak supports various protocols such as
OpenID
OpenID is an open standard and decentralized authentication protocol promoted by the non-profit OpenID Foundation. It allows users to be authenticated by co-operating sites (known as relying parties, or RP) using a third-party identity provi ...
,
OAuth
OAuth (short for open authorization) is an open standard for access delegation, commonly used as a way for internet users to grant websites or applications access to their information on other websites but without giving them the passwords. Th ...
version 2.0 and
SAML and provides features such as user management,
two-factor authentication
Multi-factor authentication (MFA; two-factor authentication, or 2FA) is an electronic authentication method in which a user is granted access to a website or Application software, application only after successfully presenting two or more distin ...
, permissions and roles management, creating
token services, etc. It is possible to integrate Keycloak with other technologies, such as front-end frameworks like React or Angular, as well as containerization solutions like Docker.
History
The first production release of Keycloak was in September 2014, with development having started about a year earlier. In 2016, Red Hat switched the RH SSO product from being based on the PicketLink framework to being based on the Keycloak upstream Project.
This followed a merging of the PicketLink codebase into Keycloak.
To some extent Keycloak can now also be considered a replacement of the Red Hat ''JBoss SSO'' open source product which was previously superseded by PicketLink.
, JBoss.org is redirecting the old jbosssso subsite to the Keycloak website. The JBoss name is a registered trademark and Red Hat moved its upstream open source projects names to avoid using JBoss, ''JBoss AS'' to ''
Wildfly'' being a more commonly recognized example.
Components
There are two main components of Keycloak:
* Keycloak server, including the
API
An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...
and graphical interface.
* Keycloak client. Previously Keycloak included a set of 'adapter' libraries, but those were discontinued in 2022.
See also
*
OpenAM
*
List of single sign-on implementations
References
External links
*
*
Computer security software
Java enterprise platform
Federated identity
Java (programming language) software
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