Keycloak 25.0.0 released

June 10 2024

To download the release go to Keycloak downloads.

Highlights

Account Console v2 theme removed

The Account Console v2 theme has been removed from Keycloak. This theme was deprecated in Keycloak 24 and replaced by the Account Console v3 theme. If you are still using this theme, you should migrate to the Account Console v3 theme.

Java 21 support

Keycloak now supports OpenJDK 21, as we want to stick to the latest LTS OpenJDK versions.

Java 17 support is deprecated

OpenJDK 17 support is deprecated in Keycloak, and will be removed in a following release in favor of OpenJDK 21.

Most of Java adapters removed

As stated in the release notes of previous Keycloak version, the most of Java adapters are now removed from the Keycloak codebase and downloads pages.

For OAuth 2.0/OIDC, this includes removal of the Tomcat adapter, WildFly/EAP adapter, Servlet Filter adapter, KeycloakInstalled desktop adapter, the jaxrs-oauth-client adapter, JAAS login modules, Spring adapter and SpringBoot adapters. You can check our older post for the list of some alternatives.

For SAML, this includes removal of the Tomcat adapter and Servlet filter adapter. SAML adapters are still supported with WildFly and JBoss EAP.

The generic Authorization Client library is still supported, and we still plan to support it. It aims to be used in combination with any other OAuth 2.0 or OpenID Connect libraries. You can check the quickstarts for some examples where this authorization client library is used together with the 3rd party Java adapters like Elytron OIDC or SpringBoot. You can check the quickstarts also for the example of SAML adapter used with WildFly.

Upgrade to PatternFly 5

In Keycloak 24, the Welcome page is updated to use PatternFly 5, the latest version of the design system that underpins the user interface of Keycloak. In this release, the Admin Console and Account Console are also updated to use PatternFly 5. If you want to extend and customize the Admin Console and Account Console, review the changes in PatternFly 5 and update your customizations accordingly.

Argon2 password hashing

Argon2 is now the default password hashing algorithm used by Keycloak in a non-FIPS environment.

Argon2 was the winner of the 2015 password hashing competition and is the recommended hashing algorithm by OWASP.

In Keycloak 24 the default hashing iterations for PBKDF2 were increased from 27.5K to 210K, resulting in a more than 10 times increase in the amount of CPU time required to generate a password hash. With Argon2 it is possible to achieve better security, with almost the same CPU time as previous releases of Keycloak. One downside is Argon2 requires more memory, which is a requirement to be resistant against GPU attacks. The defaults for Argon2 in Keycloak requires 7MB per-hashing request. To prevent excessive memory and CPU usage, the parallel computation of hashes by Argon2 is by default limited to the number of cores available to the JVM. To support the memory intensive nature of Argon2, we have updated the default GC from ParallelGC to G1GC for a better heap utilization.

New Hostname options

In response to the complexity and lack of intuitiveness experienced with previous hostname configuration settings, we are proud to introduce Hostname v2 options.

We have listened to your feedback, tackled the tricky issues, and created a smoother experience for managing hostname configuration. Be aware that even the behavior behind these options has changed and requires your attention - if you are dealing with custom hostname settings.

Hostname v2 options are supported by default, as the old hostname options are deprecated and will be removed in the following releases. You should migrate to them as soon as possible.

New options are activated by default, so Keycloak will not recognize the old ones.

For information on how to migrate, see the Upgrading Guide.

Persistent user sessions

Previous versions of Keycloak stored only offline user and offline client sessions in the databases. The new feature persistent-user-session stores online user sessions and online client sessions not only in memory, but also in the database. This will allow a user to stay logged in even if all instances of Keycloak are restarted or upgraded.

The feature is a preview feature and disabled by default. To use it, add the following to your build command:

bin/kc.sh build --features=persistent-user-session ...

For more details see the Enabling and disabling features guide. The sizing guide contains a new paragraph describing the updated resource requirements when this feature is enabled.

For information on how to upgrade, see the Upgrading Guide.

Cookies updates

SameSite attribute set for all cookies

The following cookies did not use to set the SameSite attribute, which in recent browser versions results in them defaulting to SameSite=Lax:

  • KC_STATE_CHECKER now sets SameSite=Strict

  • KC_RESTART now sets SameSite=None

  • KEYCLOAK_LOCALE now sets SameSite=None

  • KEYCLOAK_REMEMBER_ME now sets SameSite=None

The default value SameSite=Lax causes issues with POST based bindings, mostly applicable to SAML, but also used in some OpenID Connect / OAuth 2.0 flows.

Removing KC_AUTH_STATE cookie

The cookie KC_AUTH_STATE is removed and it is no longer set by the Keycloak server as this server no longer needs this cookie.

Deprecated cookie methods removed

The following APIs for setting custom cookies have been removed:

  • ServerCookie - replaced by NewCookie.Builder

  • LocaleSelectorProvider.KEYCLOAK_LOCALE - replaced by CookieType.LOCALE

  • HttpCookie - replaced by NewCookie.Builder

  • HttpResponse.setCookieIfAbsent(HttpCookie cookie) - replaced by HttpResponse.setCookieIfAbsent(NewCookie cookie)

Addressed 'You are already logged in' for expired authentication sessions

The Keycloak 23 release provided improvements for when a user is authenticated in parallel in multiple browser tabs. However, this improvement did not address the case when an authentication session expired. Now for the case when user is already logged-in in one browser tab and an authentication session expired in other browser tabs, Keycloak is able to redirect back to the client application with an OIDC/SAML error, so the client application can immediately retry authentication, which should usually automatically log in the application because of the SSO session. For more details, see Server Administration Guide authentication sessions.

Lightweight access token to be even more lightweight

In previous releases, the support for lightweight access token was added. In this release, we managed to remove even more built-in claims from the lightweight access token. The claims are added by protocol mappers. Some of them affect even the regular access tokens or ID tokens as they were not strictly required by the OIDC specification.

  • Claims sub and auth_time are added by protocol mappers now, which are configured by default on the new client scope basic, which is added automatically to all the clients. The claims are still added to the ID token and access token as before, but not to lightweight access token.

  • Claim nonce is added only to the ID token now. It is not added to a regular access token or lightweight access token. For backwards compatibility, you can add this claim to an access token by protocol mapper, which needs to be explicitly configured.

  • Claim session_state is not added to any token now. It is still possible to add it by protocol mapper if needed. There is still the other dedicated claim sid supported by the specification, which was available in previous versions as well and which has exactly the same value.

For more details, see the Upgrading Guide..

Support for application/jwt media-type in token introspection endpoint

You can use the HTTP Header Accept: application/jwt when invoking a token introspection endpoint. When enabled for a particular client, it returns a claim jwt from the token introspection endpoint with the full JWT access token, which can be useful especially for the use-cases when the client calling introspection endpoint used lightweight access token. Thanks to Thomas Darimont for the contribution.

Password policy for check if password contains Username

Keycloak supports a new password policy that allows you to deny user passwords which contains the user username.

Required actions improvements

In the Admin Console, you can now configure some required actions in the Required actions tab of a particular realm. Currently, the Update password is the only built-in configurable required action. It supports setting Maximum Age of Authentication, which is the maximum time users can update their password by the kc_action parameter (used for instance when updating password in the Account Console) without re-authentication. The sorting of required actions is also improved. When there are multiple required actions during authentication, all actions are sorted together regardless of whether those are actions set during authentication (for instance by the kc_action parameter) or actions added to the user account manually by an administrator. Thanks to Thomas Darimont and Daniel Fesenmeyer for the contributions.

Passkeys improvements

The support for Passkeys conditional UI was added. When the Passkeys preview feature is enabled, there is a dedicated authenticator available, which means you can select from a list of available passkeys accounts and authenticate a user based on that. Thanks to Takashi Norimatsu for the contribution.

Default client profile for SAML

The default client profile to have secured SAML clients was added. When browsing through client policies of a realm in the Admin Console, you see a new client profile saml-security-profile. When it is used, there are security best practices applied for SAML clients such as signatures are enforced, SAML Redirect binding is disabled, and wildcard redirect URLs are prohibited.

Authenticator for override existing IDP link during first-broker-login

There was new authenticator Confirm override existing link added. This authenticator allows to override linked IDP username for the Keycloak user, which was already linked to different IDP identity before. More details in the Server Administration Guide. Thanks to Lex Cao for the contribution.

OpenID for Verifiable Credential Issuance - experimental support

There is work in progress on the support of OpenID for Verifiable Credential Issuance (OID4VCI). Right now, this is still work in progress, but things are being gradually added. Keycloak can act as an OID4VC Issuer with support of Pre-Authorized code flow. There is support for verifiable credentials in the JWT-VC, SD-JWT-VC and VCDM formats. Thanks to the members of the OAuth SIG groups for the contributions and feedback and especially thanks to Stefan Wiedemann, Francis Pouatcha, Takashi Norimatsu and Yutaka Obuchi.

Searching by user attribute no longer case insensitive

When searching for users by user attribute, Keycloak no longer searches for user attribute names forcing lower case comparisons. The goal of this change was to speed up searches by using Keycloak’s native index on the user attribute table. If your database collation is case-insensitive, your search results will stay the same. If your database collation is case-sensitive, you might see less search results than before.

Breaking fix in authorization client library

For users of the keycloak-authz-client library, calling AuthorizationResource.getPermissions(…​) now correctly returns a List<Permission>.

Previously, it would return a List<Map> at runtime, even though the method declaration advertised List<Permission>.

This fix will break code that relied on casting the List or its contents to List<Map>. If you have used this method in any capacity, you are likely to have done this and be affected.

IDs are no longer set when exporting authorization settings for a client

When exporting the authorization settings for a client, the IDs for resources, scopes, and policies are no longer set. As a result, you can now import the settings from a client to another client.

Management port for metrics and health endpoints

Metrics and health checks endpoints are no longer accessible through the standard Keycloak server port. As these endpoints should be hidden from the outside world, they can be accessed on a separate default management port 9000.

It allows to not expose it to the users as standard Keycloak endpoints in Kubernetes environments. The new management interface provides a new set of options and is fully configurable.

Keycloak Operator assumes the management interface is turned on by default. For more details, see Configuring the Management Interface.

Syslog for remote logging

Keycloak now supports Syslog protocol for remote logging. It utilizes the protocol defined in RFC 5424. By default, the syslog handler is disabled, but when enabled, it sends all log events to a remote syslog server.

For more information, see the Configuring logging guide.

Change to class EnvironmentDependentProviderFactory

The method EnvironmentDependentProviderFactory.isSupported() was deprecated for several releases and has now been removed.

For more details, see the Upgrading Guide.

All cache options are runtime

It is now possible to specify the cache, cache-stack, and cache-config-file options during runtime. This eliminates the need to execute the build phase and rebuild your image due to them.

For more details, see the Upgrading Guide.

High availability guide enhanced

The high availability guide now contains a guide on how to configure an AWS Lambda to prevent an intended automatic failback from the Backup site to the Primary site.

Removing deprecated methods from AccessToken, IDToken, and JsonWebToken classes

In this release, we are finally removing deprecated methods from the following classes:

  • AccessToken

  • IDToken

  • JsonWebToken

For more details, see the Upgrading Guide.

Method getExp added to SingleUseObjectKeyModel

As a consequence of the removal of deprecated methods from AccessToken, IDToken, and JsonWebToken, the SingleUseObjectKeyModel also changed to keep consistency with the method names related to expiration values.

For more details, see the Upgrading Guide.

Support for PostgreSQL 16

The supported and tested databases now include PostgreSQL 16.

Introducing support for Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) and Multi-tenancy

In this release, we are delivering Keycloak Organizations as a technology preview feature.

This feature provides a realm with some core CIAM capabilities, which will serve as the baseline for more capabilities in the future to address Business-to-Business (B2B) and Business-to-Business-to-Customers (B2B2C) use cases.

In terms of functionality, the feature is completed. However, we still have work to do to make it fully supported in the next major release. This remaining work is mainly about preparing the feature for production deployments with a focus on scalability. Also, depending on the feedback we get until the next major release, we might eventually accept additional capabilities and add more value to the feature, without compromising its roadmap.

For more details, see Server Administration Guide.

Upgrading

Before upgrading refer to the migration guide for a complete list of changes.

All resolved issues

New features

Enhancements

Bugs