1:11 a.m.
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> 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
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