Re: [keycloak-user] Keycloak as ID provider for large amount of devices

Hi, That's a very interesting use-case. One which we have wanted to look into ourselves, but haven't had the resources. Ideally I'd say we'd have a device concept in Keycloak as they're not strictly clients or users. They'd most likely be backed by users, but would have different screens for configuration and would have separate authentication flows. That would require a fair bit of work to add though. In the mean time I don't think clients are a good fit as Keycloak is not currently designed to have large amounts of clients, both for manageability and performance. Both of the issues can be overcome fairly easily, but that would require some work. The best solution in my opinion is to use users and implement your own custom authenticator to handle IOT devices. It's fairly simply to do and gives you the ability to handle authentication of the devices exactly how you want to. See http://keycloak.github.io/docs/userguide/keycloak-server/html/auth_spi.html for more details. I'd appreciate if you kept me updated on your progress as I'm very interested :) On 12 May 2016 at 10:29, Matuszak, Eduard <eduard.matuszak(a)atos.net&gt; wrote: > > Hello > > We are planning to get a lot of devices, identifyable by individual > certificates, into an IOT-system being designed and developed at the > moment. We choosed to authenticate all actors (users, software > components and devices as well) by OIDC-tokens and (pre)decided to > use Keycloak as ID provider. User and software components are quite > straightforward to handle with Keycloak (as Keycloak users with the > help of a user federation provider & id brokerage and for > applications as Keycloak clients respectively). But I am not sure of > how to represent our devices (we want to support hundreds of > thousands of them later on!) by Keycloak means. > > It seems that we essentially have 2 possiblities to register a device > in Keycloak > * As a user > * As a client > > By representing devices as Keycloak clients we might take advantage > of the ServiceAccount (Oauth-Client Credential) flow and become able > to implement it via (dynamic!) registration and it and seems, that we > will even be able to authenticate our device by their certificates by > choosing "Signed Jwt" as authenticator option. > > My question is, if it would be a good idea to register a very big > amount of devices as Keycloak clients with regards to performance and > manageability. In principle I would prefer a user-representation > (faciliting usage of user federation provider & id brokerage for > instance), but as far as I understood, the appropriate flow would be > Direct Access (ResourceOwnerPassword Credentials) and here we can > only deal with username/password instead of certificates. > > Do you have any suggestions or hints (even the conclusion, that > Keycloak is not the suitable ID-provider-implementation for large- > scale IOT-systems)? > > Best regards, Eduard Matuszak > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > keycloak-user mailing list > keycloak-user(a)lists.jboss.org > https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/keycloak-user _________________________________________________ keycloak-user mailing list keycloak-user(a)lists.jboss.org https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/keycloak-user