From: "Stan Silvert" <ssilvert(a)redhat.com>
To: keycloak-user(a)lists.jboss.org
Sent: Thursday, 9 April, 2015 2:15:17 PM
Subject: Re: [keycloak-user] Impersonate User
I've only worked on one application that required impersonation, but we
thought about the problem differently.
It was the corporate travel offering from Sabre. The problem was that an
administrative assistant needed to be able to book travel for one or more
executives. The assistant would not actually impersonate the user, but the
application simply knew who she was allowed to book travel for. Therefore,
impersonation was really more like composite roles that included a user name
(or a wildcard for "any user"). It was up to the application to know what to
do with the roles. It would present a drop-down to select which user you
were working on behalf of.
This way, you never require more than one login or logout. You are just
pushing all the complexity onto the application. But maybe that's where it
belongs.
I totally agree - we can make life easier for app developers by providing a token swap
service like I suggested though ;)
On 4/9/2015 3:23 AM, Marek Posolda wrote:
This is very similar to how I've implemented impersonation in GateIn portal.
Basically the session wrapped the "admin" session and after logout, the
admin session was restored back. So admin wasn't logged-out, but he was able
to continue with his session in exactly same state like before
impersonation.
But for the Keycloak, it will be very tricky to support this as Keycloak is
SSO and admin is already logged to some applications before he started
impersonation session. So for support of save/restore the admin session, we
would need to implement the "stack" for the UserSession on auth-server but
also for all the application sessions. This might be possible (but quite
tricky) for servlet adapters, but I am not seeing how to properly support it
for JS adapter...
In shortcut, it seems that we would really need to logout original admin
session and then login as impersonated user. For audit purpose, we will have
info that session is impersonated, but IMO we will not be able to restore
original admin session back to the state before impersonation.
Marek
On 8.4.2015 16:56, Scott Rossillo wrote:
One thing I've seen done with Spring Security (custom code) is to implement
the impersonation as a "stack." An admin impersonating another user gets
pushed instead of logged out and when the impersonated user is logged out,
the admin is popped and re-becomes the principal. This may be much more
complex with distributed security, but the pseudo code of the token would be
something like:
public class KeycloakSecurityContext {
boolean isImpersonated;
KeycloakSecurityContext impersonatingContext;
}
This is obviously only one aspect but could be used by an application to know
if the user is impersonated, and who's doing the impersonating.
~ Scott
On Wed, Apr 8, 2015 at 10:17 AM, Raghu Prabhala < prabhalar(a)yahoo.com >
wrote:
Jumping in with my requirements as Impersonation is a very sensitive issue.
It has to be read only and clearly indicated in both gui and audit engine(
logs). We typically require both the admin and user information populated
for audit purposes which means that the admin should not be logged out.
Sent from my iPhone
> On Apr 8, 2015, at 9:55 AM, Bill Burke < bburke(a)redhat.com > wrote:
>
> I worry a bit about how this can be exploited. I think it might need to
> be its own service that
>
> 1. checks and verifies the admin is logged in (via the cookie)
> 2. Re-authenticates the admin manually
> 3. Logouts out the admin and logins him in as impersonated user.
>
> There might be other sensitive areas/features where we might want to
> require manual re-authentication before.
>
> Also, we might also want to add information to the id/access tokens and
> saml assertions for auditing purposes so that clients know that the user
> is being impersonated.
>
> FYI, I know this is a must-have feature in order for Red Hat IT to use us.
>
>
>> On 4/8/2015 12:53 AM, Stian Thorgersen wrote:
>> I would say an admin would need a special role as well as having all the
>> roles of the user the admin wants to impersonate.
>>
>> That's the simple part, second part would be to let an admin login as
>> another user. Maybe that could be done with a query param to the
>> authorization endpoint, for example:
>>
>>
/realms/myrealm/protocols/openid-connect/auth?...&kc_impersonate=<username>
>>
>> Would also be good to have a enable/disable option for this feature for a
>> realm.
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "Scott Rossillo" < srossillo(a)smartling.com >
>>> To: "Bill Burke" < bburke(a)redhat.com >
>>> Cc: keycloak-user(a)lists.jboss.org
>>> Sent: Wednesday, 8 April, 2015 1:13:19 AM
>>> Subject: Re: [keycloak-user] Impersonate User
>>>
>>> Thanks.
>>>
>>> Out of curiosity, how do you see this being implemented? Would a user who
>>> can
>>> impersonate another have a specific role to allow this?
>>>
>>> I’m thinking a bit about how I may be able to support it before it
>>> becomes a
>>> feature, or if it’s something we would be able to contribute.
>>>
>>> ~ Scott
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Tue, Apr 7, 2015 at 6:06 PM, Bill Burke < bburke(a)redhat.com >
wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> We don't have this feature but it is something that some key customers
>>> want. I would say we would get to it sometime this summer.
>>>
>>>> On 4/7/2015 6:03 PM, Scott Rossillo wrote:
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> We’re looking for the best way to support having one user, such as an
>>>> admin, have the ability to impersonate another user. I don’t see a
>>>> simple way to do this with Keycloak at the moment.
>>>>
>>>> Would you mind letting me know if this is on the roadmap - I didn’t see
>>>> a JIRA - or if you have any recommendations on implementing such
>>>> behavior.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks,
>>>> Scott
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
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>>>
>>> --
>>> Bill Burke
>>> JBoss, a division of Red Hat
>>>
http://bill.burkecentral.com
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>
> --
> Bill Burke
> JBoss, a division of Red Hat
>
http://bill.burkecentral.com
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