[keycloak-dev] Application Initiated Actions

[Stian Thorgersen]

Was hoping for some more feedback from the list on this one.

Especially around not having any authentication of the clients wanting to
initiate an action. I feel reasonable comfortable about not securing it and
requiring actions to prompt the user before doing anything, but welcome
others opinion on it.

On Thu, 28 Feb 2019 at 11:07, Peter Skopek <pskopek at redhat.com> wrote:

> Since there is no "silent" application initiated action (always
> prompts user) possible and actions are predefined at keycloak I see no
> need for the client/application restriction mechanism.
>
> On Wed, Feb 27, 2019 at 4:23 PM Stian Thorgersen <sthorger at redhat.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Keycloak currently has required actions that are used to prompt the user
> to
> > perform an action associated with their account after authenticating, but
> > prior to being redirected to the application.
> >
> > Examples include: configure OTP, update profile, validate email, etc.
> >
> > One issue here is these actions have to be manually registered with the
> > users account, but can not be initiated by applications themselves. As an
> > example it may not be required by all users to verify their email, but
> only
> > when they use specific applications.
> >
> > Keycloak also needs to initiate actions from the account management
> > console. Examples: updating email address should require verifying the
> > email, configuring OTP, etc.
> >
> > With that in mind we are proposing to introduce Application Initiated
> > Actions. An Application Initiated Action behind the scenes is just a
> > Required Action, but it is initiated by an application and depending on
> the
> > action may be optional for the user to complete (where the user can
> select
> > cancel which would return the user back to the application).
> >
> > No Application Initiated Actions should perform any updates to the users
> > account without prompting the user first. For example an application
> > initiated action that is used to link an existing account to a social
> > provider should ask the user first if they want to link to the provider.
> >
> > To make it easy for applications to integrate these I would like to
> > leverage the standard OAuth flows that applications use to authenticate
> > users. So to initiate verify-email action the application would redirect
> to
> > the authentication endpoint and add kc_action=<action alias> query
> > parameter.
> >
> > One open question I have right now is. Assuming all Application Initiated
> > Actions always prompt the user first do we need to add some mechanism in
> > place to restrict what clients/applications are permitted to initiate an
> > action? Requiring that would make it harder to use for applications.
> >
> > One thing I would also like to add is the ability for an Application
> > Initiated Action to require the user to re-authenticate prior to
> performing
> > the action. For example update password should require the user to enter
> > the current password, while verify email should not (as it simply sends
> an
> > email with a link to continue).
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>