[keycloak-user] Token generation: possibilities to improve performance
Marek Posolda
mposolda at redhat.com
Mon May 30 06:03:20 EDT 2016
On 30/05/16 11:51, Stian Thorgersen wrote:
>
>
> On 30 May 2016 at 11:13, Marek Posolda <mposolda at redhat.com
> <mailto:mposolda at redhat.com>> wrote:
>
> On 30/05/16 08:02, Stian Thorgersen wrote:
>> Create a JIRA for ECDSA. I don't think we could/should change the
>> default, but could be a configuration option for clients.
> Added https://issues.jboss.org/browse/KEYCLOAK-3057 with fix
> version 2.0.0.CR1 for now.
>>
>> Looking at OpenID Connect spec it looks like ID token should
>> always be generated in token response [1]. However, it should not
>> be generated in refresh [2] response.
>>
>> [1]
>> http://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-core-1_0.html#rfc.section.3.1.3.3
>> [2]
>> http://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-core-1_0.html#rfc.section.12.2
> hmm... I am reading 12.2 that refresh response "might not" contain
> ID Token, hence it's nothing bad if it contains it. So looks we
> are currently specs compliant if we have IDToken in both
> code-to-token response and refresh response.
>
> What I mean is, that flag for skip IDToken generation might be
> just optional and disabled by default. So by default, IDToken is
> available and all the communication is OIDC compliant. However if
> someone doesn't need IDToken and wants to save some performance,
> he may skip the IDToken generation.
>
> A week before, I've tried some JProfiler testing of login-logout
> test and token generation was the main CPU consumption (I still
> had just 1 hashIteration during this profiling, with 20000 it will
> be likely very different though). I saw 40% of CPU time in
> TokenManager$AccessTokenResponseBuilder.build()due there are 3
> tokens signature here. The option to reduce it from 3 to 2 might
> slightly improve some CPU cycles "for free" (security won't be
> reduced).
>
>
> I'd argue that we should just include ID token from the authorization
> response, while never in the refresh response. That results in better
> performance without the need for a config option.
Won't that break compatibility for some client applications, which
actually use IDToken and rely on the fact that it's properly refreshed
every time? Among other things, IDToken contains fields like "exp" ,
which might then contain expired value as it won't be updated during
refreshes. Not sure if users won't be confused due to this.
Marek
>
>
>
> Marek
>
>
>> On 27 May 2016 at 19:19, Marek Posolda <mposolda at redhat.com
>> <mailto:mposolda at redhat.com>> wrote:
>>
>> Regarding this, I wonder if we should add support for ECDSA
>> based signatures as an alternative to RSA? Just went through
>> some interesting blog [1] , which mentions that 256-bits
>> ECDSA has around 9.5 times better performance of signature
>> generation than 2048-bits RSA. The time of signature
>> verification seems to be slightly worse for ECDSA (see second
>> comment), however there is also increased security (256-ECDSA
>> is equivalient of 3248 RSA according to blog). Maybe it's
>> something we can look at?
>>
>> Also the optional flag to skip IDToken generation will be
>> good too IMO. AFAIK the point of IDToken is the compliance
>> with OIDC specification. However in case of Keycloak
>> accessToken usually contains all the info like IDToken (+
>> some more) and it's the accessToken, which is used in REST
>> endpoints. So with regards to that, most of the
>> Keycloak-secured applications can live just with
>> access+refresh token and don't need ID Token at all. So if
>> just 2 tokens needs to be signed instead of 3, we have
>> performance gain "for free" (no decrease of security, just
>> one less useless token).
>>
>> [1]
>> https://blog.cloudflare.com/ecdsa-the-digital-signature-algorithm-of-a-better-internet/
>>
>> Marek
>>
>>
>> On 24/05/16 15:43, Bill Burke wrote:
>>> Are you sure the performance gains are worth less security?
>>> What kind of performance are you actually worried about?
>>> Network (size of tokens) or CPU
>>> (signatures/marshaling/unmarshalling)? If anything, these
>>> signatures are only going to get stronger in future releases.
>>>
>>> On 5/24/16 5:46 AM, Matuszak, Eduard wrote:
>>>> Hello
>>>> Motivated by considerations on how to improve the
>>>> performance of the token generation process I have two
>>>> questions:
>>>>
>>>> * I noticed that Keycloak’s token generation via endpoint
>>>> “auth/realms/ccp/protocol/openid-connect/token”
>>>> generates a triple of tokens (access-, refresh- and
>>>> id-token). Is there any possibility to dispense with
>>>> the id-token generation?
>>>>
>>>> * Is there a possibility to cause Keycloak to generate
>>>> more “simple” bearer tokens then complex jwt-tokens?
>>>>
>>>> Best regards, Eduard Matuszak
>>>>
>>>>
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>>>
>>>
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>>
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>
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