[keycloak-user] Keycloak Proxy passing thorugh unauthenticated

[Jason Axley]

Not requiring a plugin is a fine design goal, but the applications must have custom code to at least extract the user’s identity information from the HTTP requests.  It would be best design approach to actually provide the application with *verifiable* identity information in the form of the JWT that can be verified with a plugin or inside the same set of application code that is responsible for extracting the identity for the request.

Perhaps since the access token is sent along as KEYCLOAK_ACCESS_TOKEN so the server could request the JWT if they knew the URL?  I would be sure to document how integrating applications behind the proxy should securely integrate and validate the identity information, otherwise apps won’t do this securely.

Secure design necessitates replacing assumptions with controls wherever possible.  Assumptions such as “there is no bad guy on my network” are pretty devastating to security and in practice impossible to ensure but a control such as “attackers cannot forge JWT tokens“ are much more robust and easy to reason about.  

-Jason

On 5/13/16, 11:58 AM, "keycloak-user-bounces at lists.jboss.org on behalf of Bill Burke" <keycloak-user-bounces at lists.jboss.org on behalf of bburke at redhat.com> wrote:

>The idea of the proxy is that the secured app doesn't have to have a 
>plugin.  The secured app is supposed to be on a private network and the 
>proxy sits on a public one.
>
>
>On 5/13/16 11:52 AM, Jason Axley wrote:
>>  From my read of the design, it doesn’t look like the proxy design provides a secure way of front-ending an application that won’t allow someone with network access behind the proxy to access the application either without authentication or by impersonating any user since the design appears to rely on HTTP headers set with identity information sent to the backend application.
>>
>> A better design would have been to pass the actual Id Token to the backend application so that the backend application can actually verify the identity signature on the JWT so that someone can’t just fabricate arbitrary identity information.  I would think this could work in concert with an application plugin that could consume these tokens and validate and make the identity information available to the application in a trustworthy manner.
>>
>> -Jason
>>
>> On 5/13/16, 8:00 AM, "keycloak-user-bounces at lists.jboss.org on behalf of Guy Bowdler" <keycloak-user-bounces at lists.jboss.org on behalf of guybowdler at dorsetnetworks.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> We've got the Keycloak Security Proxy (official one -
>>> https://keycloak.github.io/docs/userguide/keycloak-server/html/proxy.html)
>>> running and passing to an nginx proxy which is in turn proxying out
>>> different apps, ie:
>>>
>>> [client] ----> [:80|443 KeyCloak Proxy ----> :8080 Nginx Reverse Proxy]
>>> ------> [application]
>>>
>>> Where [] denotes a different box, the ProxyBox is hostname.domain and
>>> the apps are published as hostname.domain/appname
>>>
>>>
>>> However, the client is able to access the application without
>>> authentication, we have clients and roles set up in keycloak and the
>>> config looks ok (although obviously isn't!)
>>>
>>> Are there any KeyCloak Proxy logs we can look at, or debugging options?
>>> I haven't found any as yet andnothing is jumping out of the config.
>>>
>>> We can access the back end apps ok either from the Keycloak proxy
>>> running on ports 80 or 443 or via the nginx proxy on 8080 (and yes, this
>>> latter connection will be restricted to localhost when it's working!).
>>> The keycloak proxy config is very similar to the default except the
>>> values from the keycloak installation GUI have been pasted in.
>>>
>>> Any troubleshooting tips would be much appreciated!
>>>
>>> thanks in advance:)
>>>
>>> Guy
>>>
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>>
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