[keycloak-user] Token generation: possibilities to improve performance

[Marek Posolda]

On 30/05/16 08:02, Stian Thorgersen wrote:
> Create a JIRA for ECDSA. I don't think we could/should change the 
> default, but could be a configuration option for clients.
Added https://issues.jboss.org/browse/KEYCLOAK-3057 with fix version 
2.0.0.CR1 for now.
>
> Looking at OpenID Connect spec it looks like ID token should always be 
> generated in token response [1]. However, it should not be generated 
> in refresh [2] response.
>
> [1] 
> http://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-core-1_0.html#rfc.section.3.1.3.3
> [2] http://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-core-1_0.html#rfc.section.12.2
hmm... I am reading 12.2 that refresh response "might not" contain ID 
Token, hence it's nothing bad if it contains it. So looks we are 
currently specs compliant if we have IDToken in both code-to-token 
response and refresh response.

What I mean is, that flag for skip IDToken generation might be just 
optional and disabled by default. So by default, IDToken is available 
and all the communication is OIDC compliant. However if someone doesn't 
need IDToken and wants to save some performance, he may skip the IDToken 
generation.

A week before, I've tried some JProfiler testing of login-logout test 
and token generation was the main CPU consumption (I still had just 1 
hashIteration during this profiling, with 20000 it will be likely very 
different though). I saw 40% of CPU time in 
TokenManager$AccessTokenResponseBuilder.build()due there are 3 tokens 
signature here. The option to reduce it from 3 to 2 might slightly 
improve some CPU cycles "for free" (security won't be reduced).

Marek

> On 27 May 2016 at 19:19, Marek Posolda <mposolda at redhat.com 
> <mailto:mposolda at redhat.com>> wrote:
>
>     Regarding this, I wonder if we should add support for ECDSA based
>     signatures as an alternative to RSA? Just went through some
>     interesting blog [1] , which mentions that 256-bits ECDSA has
>     around 9.5 times better performance of signature generation than
>     2048-bits RSA. The time of signature verification seems to be
>     slightly worse for ECDSA (see second comment), however there is
>     also increased security (256-ECDSA is equivalient of 3248 RSA
>     according to blog). Maybe it's something we can look at?
>
>     Also the optional flag to skip IDToken generation will be good too
>     IMO. AFAIK the point of IDToken is the compliance with OIDC
>     specification. However in case of Keycloak accessToken usually
>     contains all the info like IDToken (+ some more) and it's the
>     accessToken, which is used in REST endpoints. So with regards to
>     that, most of the Keycloak-secured applications can live just with
>     access+refresh token and don't need ID Token at all. So if just 2
>     tokens needs to be signed instead of 3, we have performance gain
>     "for free" (no decrease of security, just one less useless token).
>
>     [1]
>     https://blog.cloudflare.com/ecdsa-the-digital-signature-algorithm-of-a-better-internet/
>
>     Marek
>
>
>     On 24/05/16 15:43, Bill Burke wrote:
>>     Are you sure the performance gains are worth less security?  What
>>     kind of performance are you actually worried about?  Network
>>     (size of tokens) or CPU (signatures/marshaling/unmarshalling)? 
>>     If anything, these signatures are only going to get stronger in
>>     future releases.
>>
>>     On 5/24/16 5:46 AM, Matuszak, Eduard wrote:
>>>     Hello
>>>     Motivated by considerations on how to improve the performance of
>>>     the token generation process I have two questions:
>>>
>>>       * I noticed that Keycloak’s token generation via endpoint
>>>         “auth/realms/ccp/protocol/openid-connect/token” generates a
>>>         triple of tokens (access-, refresh- and id-token). Is there
>>>         any possibility to dispense with the id-token generation?
>>>
>>>       * Is there a possibility to cause Keycloak to generate more
>>>         “simple” bearer tokens then complex jwt-tokens?
>>>
>>>     Best regards, Eduard Matuszak
>>>
>>>
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>>
>>
>>
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>
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