WildFly Elytron

WildFly Elytron

Securing a WildFly Application Using OpenID Connect With Additional Scope Values

By Prarthona Paul | April 29, 2024
#oidc #authentication #scopes

WildFly 32 includes the ability to add additional scope values when securing applications using OpenID Connect (OIDC). This new feature is available at the Preview stability level. OpenID Connect is an identity layer on top of the OAuth 2.0 protocol that makes it possible for a client to verify a user’s identity based on authentication that’s performed by an OpenID provider. The OpenID Connect specification indicates that there are other scope values which may be included in the authentication request to ask permission to access additional and specific resources. This guide shows how to configure additional scope values when securing a WildFly app with OpenID Connect on OpenShift.

Prerequisites

To follow along with this guide, you will need:

  • Roughly 15 minutes

  • Access to an OpenShift cluster (try the Red Hat Developer Sandbox for free)

  • OpenShift CLI

  • Helm Chart

Example Application

We will use a simple web application in this guide that consists of a single servlet. We will secure this servlet using OIDC.

We will use the example in the elytron-oidc-client-scope directory in this repo.

To obtain this example, clone the elytron-examples repository to your local machine:

git clone git@github.com:wildfly-security-incubator/elytron-examples.git

Log Into the OpenShift Cluster

Before we can deploy our application, we need to log into an OpenShift cluster. You can log in via the OpenShift CLI:

oc login -u myUserName

Alternatively, to log in using the API token, navigate to Developer Sandbox, click on your username at the top right corner, and click on Copy login command. It will redirect you to a page where you can copy your login command and paste it on your terminal. The command will be in this format:

oc login --token=myToken --server=myServerUrl

Once you have your environment set up with the required tools, we can move on to the next step to build and deploy our application on OpenShift.

Start Keycloak

We will be using Keycloak as our OpenID identity provider.

To start a Keycloak server in your project on OpenShift, use the following command:

oc process -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/keycloak/keycloak-quickstarts/latest/openshift/keycloak.yaml \
    -p KEYCLOAK_ADMIN=admin \                 (1)
    -p KEYCLOAK_ADMIN_PASSWORD=admin \        (2)
    -p NAMESPACE=<PROJECT_NAME> \               (3)
| oc create -f -
1 Replace admin with the user name you would like to use when accessing the Keycloak Administration Console.
2 Replace admin with the password you would like to use when accessing the Keycloak Administration Console.
3 Replace <PROJECT_NAME> with your project name. After running the above command, you should see the following output: 
service/keycloak created
route.route.openshift.io/keycloak created
Warning: apps.openshift.io/v1 DeploymentConfig is deprecated in v4.14+, unavailable in v4.10000+
deploymentconfig.apps.openshift.io/keycloak created.

It will take a few minutes for OpenShift to provision the Keycloak pod and its related resources.

You can use the OpenShift CLI or the OpenShift web console, depending on your preference, to check if your Keycloak server has been provisioned.

OpenShift CLI

To make sure your Keycloak server has been provisioned using the OpenShift CLI, run:

oc get pods

After a little while, check for a message similar to the following message that indicates the pod is ready:

NAME                READY     STATUS      RESTARTS   AGE
keycloak-1-deploy   0/1       Completed   0          1h
keycloak-1-l9kdx    1/1       Running     0          1h

Once the Keycloak server has been provisioned, use the following command to find the URL for your Keycloak instance’s Admin Console:

KEYCLOAK_URL=https://$(oc get route keycloak --template='{{ .spec.host }}') &&
echo "" &&
echo "Keycloak Admin Console:   $KEYCLOAK_URL/admin" &&
echo ""

OpenShift Web Console

To make sure your Keycloak server has been provisioned using the OpenShift web console, navigate to the Topology view in the Developer perspective. You can click on your keycloak app to check its status. Once it is running, you can click on Open URL and then access Keycloak’s Administration Console.

Configure Keycloak

  1. Log into the Keycloak Admin Console using the admin username and password you specified earlier.

  2. Next, create a realm called myrealm and register a client called myclient as follows:

    • General settings:

      • Client type (or Client Protocol, depending on your keycloak version): OpenID Connect

      • Client ID: myclient

    • Capability config:

      • Authentication flow: Standard flow, Direct access grants

    • Login Settings: For the Valid Redirect URIs, enter a * for now. We will come back to edit it later.

  3. Navigate to the Client scopes tab for myclient and change the Assigned type for all scope values from Default to Optional. When Client scopes are set to Default, the claims associated with them are automatically added to the access token you receive. Changing it to Optional ensures that they are not included by default and you will only get access to claims that you request using the scope values you configure. This list of scope are the values that Keycloak allows and it varies for different OpenID providers.

  4. Now, click on Realm roles and create two roles, user and admin.

  5. Finally, create a user called alice whose First name is Alice and Last name is Smith and assign her the user and admin roles. Steps for assigning roles can be found in the Keycloak documentation. We will be using different scopes to query these pieces of information about Alice.

  6. Next, navigate to the Credentials tab and create a password for Alice. Toggle the Temporary switch off so you are not prompted to update the password after the first login.

Add Helm Configuration

  • Obtain the URL for Keycloak.

KEYCLOAK_URL=https://$(oc get route keycloak --template='{{ .spec.host }}') &&
echo "" &&
echo "Keycloak URL:   $KEYCLOAK_URL" &&
echo ""

  • Switch to the charts directory in the elytron-oidc-client-scope example.

cd /PATH/TO/ELYTRON/EXAMPLES/elytron-oidc-client-scope/charts

Notice there’s a helm.yaml file in this directory with the following content:

build:
  uri: https://github.com/wildfly-security-incubator/elytron-examples.git
  contextDir: elytron-oidc-client-scope
deploy:
  replicas: 1
  env:
    - name: OIDC_PROVIDER_URL
      value: <KEYCLOAK_URL>    (1)
    - name: SERVER_ARGS
      value: "--stability=preview"
1 Replace <KEYCLOAK_URL> with the Keycloak URL obtained in the previous command.

Stability Levels for OpenShift Deployment

The WildFly server now includes different stability levels, that can be associated with functionality. Users can use the --stability argument when staring the WildFly server. Depending on the value of the stability levels, different features are available. You can learn more about stability levels here.

The scope attribute under the elytron-oidc-client subsystem is a preview level feature, which means in order to access its functionality, the server’s stability level must be set to preview. When applications are deployed to OpenShift, the WildFly Cloud Galleon Feature Pack is used to provision a server. Therefore, in order to use the scope attribute, we need to provision the server at the preview stability level. This is why we have added the environment variable named SERVER_ARGS with a value of --stability=preview, which specifies that the provisioned server should be started at the preview stability level. For more information about the server’s stability levels, please refer to WildFly Docs.

Additionally, we have used the stability galleon option to specify the stability level used by the feature pack when deploying the application using the tags below:

    <galleon-options>
        <stability-level>preview</stability-level>
    </galleon-options>

Deploy the Example Application to WildFly on OpenShift

If you haven’t already installed the WildFly Helm chart, install it:

helm repo add wildfly https://docs.wildfly.org/wildfly-charts/

If you’ve already installed the WildFly Helm Chart, be sure to update it to ensure you have the latest one:

helm repo update

We can deploy our example application to WildFly on OpenShift using the WildFly Helm Chart:

helm install oidc-app -f /PATH/TO/ELYTRON/EXAMPLES/elytron-oidc-client-scope/charts/helm.yaml wildfly/wildfly

Notice that this command specifies the file we updated, helm.yaml, that contains the values needed to build and deploy our application.

The application will now begin to build. This will take a couple of minutes.

The build can be observed using:

oc get build -w

Once complete, you can follow the deployment of the application using:

oc get deployment oidc-app -w

Alternatively, you can check status directly from the OpenShift web console.

Behind the Scenes

While our application is building, let’s take a closer look at our application.

Examine the pom.xml file.

Notice that it contains an openshift profile. A profile in Maven lets you create a set of configuration values to customize your application build for different environments. The openshift profile in this example defines a configuration that will be used by the WildFly Helm Chart when provisioning the WildFly server on OpenShift.

<profiles>
    <profile>
            <id>openshift</id>
            <build>
                <plugins>
                    <plugin>
                        <groupId>org.wildfly.plugins</groupId>
                        <artifactId>wildfly-maven-plugin</artifactId>
                        <version>${version.wildfly.maven.plugin}</version>                  (1)
                        <configuration>
                            <feature-packs>
                                <feature-pack>
                                    <location>org.wildfly:wildfly-galleon-pack:${version.wildfly}</location>
                                </feature-pack>
                                <feature-pack>
                                    <location>org.wildfly.cloud:wildfly-cloud-galleon-pack:${version.wildfly.cloud.galleon.pack}</location>
                                </feature-pack>
                            </feature-packs>
                            <layers>
                                <layer>cloud-server</layer>
                                <layer>elytron-oidc-client</layer>                      (2)
                            </layers>
                            <galleon-options>
                                <stability-level>preview</stability-level>             (3)
                            </galleon-options>
                            <filename>simple-webapp-oidc.war</filename>
                        </configuration>
                        <executions>
                            <execution>
                                <goals>
                                    <goal>package</goal>
                                </goals>
                            </execution>
                        </executions>
                    </plugin>
                </plugins>
            </build>
        </profile>
</profiles>
1 wildfly-maven-plugin provisions a WildFly server with the specified layers with our application deployed.Version 7.0.0.Beta2 or later must be used to allow for stability levels.
2 elytron-oidc-client automatically adds the native OIDC client subsystem to our WildFly installation.
3 stability-level for the feature pack is set to preview since we are making use of a preview level feature.

Examine the oidc.json file, which is used to configure the OIDC client.

{
    "client-id" : "myclient",
    "provider-url" : "${env.OIDC_PROVIDER_URL:http://localhost:8080}/realms/myrealm",
    "public-client" : "true",
    "scope" : "profile email roles web-origins microprofile-jwt offline_access",
    "principal-attribute" : "preferred_username",
    "ssl-required" : "EXTERNAL"
}

Note that we have specified the scope values to be profile, email, web-origins, microprofile-jwt, roles and offline_access in a space delimited list inside the oidc.json file. profile, email and offline_access are OpenID built-in scopes, while web-origin, microprofile-jwt and roles are Keycloak specific scope values and allow access to additional claims. You can read the descriptions under the Client scope tab for myclient to learn more about the purpose of these scope values.

Next, navigate to the OIDC application’s web.xml file and look for the following command:

    <login-config>
        <auth-method>OIDC</auth-method>         (1)
    </login-config>
1 Setting the auth-method to OIDC specifies that our application will use OpenID Connect to authenticate users.

Get the Application URL

Once the WildFly server has been provisioned, use the following command to find the URL for your example application:

    SIMPLE_WEBAPP_OIDC_URL=https://$(oc get route oidc-app --template='{{ .spec.host }}') &&
    echo "" &&
    echo "Application URL: $SIMPLE_WEBAPP_OIDC_URL/simple-webapp-oidc"  &&
    echo "Valid redirect URI: $SIMPLE_WEBAPP_OIDC_URL/simple-webapp-oidc/secured/*" &&
    echo ""

Finish Configuring Keycloak

From your myclient client in the Keycloak Administration Console, in the client settings, set Valid Redirect URI to the Valid redirect URI that was output in the previous section and then click Save.

Accessing the Application

Now, let’s try accessing our application using the application URL.

Click on Access Secured Servlet.

Now, you’ll be redirected to Keycloak to log in. If you click on the url on the search bar, you will see the scope values specified in the redirect-uri field with the different scope values separated by a +. You will also notice that a new scope value, openid, has been added. This indicates that we are going to be using OpenID Connect to authenticate the user.

Log in with alice and the password that you set when configuring Keycloak.

Next, you’ll be redirected back to our application and you should see the Secured Servlet page. That means that we were able to successfully log in to our application using the Keycloak OpenID provider!

This page will display the current principal, and a list of claim values obtained using the scope values you configured. This is what it will look like:

Current Principal 'alice'

Claims received using additional scope values:

By configuring the "profile" scope, the "given_name" and "family_name" claims are present in the access token and have values : Alice and Smith

By configuring the "email" scope, the "email_verified" claim is present in the access token and has value : false

By configuring the "roles" scope, the "realm_access" claim is present in the access token and has value : {roles=[default-roles-myrealm, offline_access, admin, uma_authorization, user]}

By configuring the "microprofile-jwt" scope, the "groups" claim is present in the access token and has value : [default-roles-myrealm, offline_access, admin, uma_authorization, user]

By configuring the "web-origins" scope, the "allowed-origins" claim is present in the access token and has value : [http://localhost:8090]

Note that the value for Current Principal may be different, and can be replaced by the unique client id assigned by keycloak.

Notice that there are no claims obtained using the offline_access scope. To learn more about what this scope value does, please refer to the OpenID Documentation .

Invalid Scope Values

Different OpenID providers have their own set of valid scope values and they vary depending on the OpenID provider. Try changing the scope values to INVALID_SCOPE inside the oidc.json file.

Deploy and access the webapp again using the command below:

helm upgrade oidc-app -f charts/helm.yaml wildfly/wildfly

Since INVALID_SCOPE is not one of the acceptable scope values, you will now see a Bad request page instead of being redirected to the Keycloak login page. You will notice that the url now contains error=invalid_scope&error_description=Invalid+scopes This indicates that your authentication request was rejected because it contains invalid scope values.

Summary

This example has demonstrated how to secure a WildFly application deployed to OpenShift using additional scope values. For more details on the elytron-oidc-client subsystem, please check out the documentation and for more details on OpenID Connect, checkout the OpenID documentation and the documentation of your OpenID provider.

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