Release Notes

Keycloak 24.0.5

Security issue with PAR clients using client_secret_post based authentication

This release contains the fix of the important security issue affecting some OIDC confidential clients using PAR (Pushed authorization request). In case you use OIDC confidential clients together with PAR and you use client authentication based on client_id and client_secret sent as parameters in the HTTP request body (method client_secret_post specified in the OIDC specification), it is highly encouraged to rotate the client secrets of your clients after upgrading to this version.

Keycloak 24.0.4

Partial update to user attributes when updating users through the Admin User API is no longer supported

When updating user attributes through the Admin User API, you cannot execute partial updates when updating the user attributes, including the root attributes like username, email, firstName, and lastName.

For more details, see the Upgrading Guide.

Keycloak 24.0.1

Operator deploys nightly build instead of 24.0.0

Due to an issue in the release process when deploying Keycloak using the Operator it installed the nightly container instead of 24.0.0.

As a quick fix to the issue, the 24.0.0 container was tagged with nightly, and the nightly releases was temporarily disabled.

If you installed or upgraded to 24.0.0 using the Operator before 5pm CET yesterday the database may have been updated with the wrong versions. To check if you are affected connect to your database and run the following SQL command:

SELECT * from migration_model WHERE version = '999.0.0';

If the above returns a matching row you will need to take some actions, otherwise database migrations will not run for future releases. To resolve this run the following SQL command:

UPDATE migration_model SET version = '24.0.0' WHERE version = '999.0.0';

Keycloak 24.0.0

Supported user profile and progressive profiling

The user profile preview feature is promoted to be fully supported and user profile is enabled by default.

In the past months, the Keycloak team spent a huge amount of effort in polishing the user profile feature to make it fully supported. In this release, we continued the effort. Lots of improvements, fixes and polishing were done based on the thorough testing and feedback from our awesome community.

The following are a few highlights of this feature;

Fine-grained control over the attributes that users and administrators can manage so that you can prevent unexpected attributes and values from being set.
Ability to specify what user attributes are managed and should be displayed on the forms to regular users or administrators.
Dynamic forms - Previously, the forms where users created or updated their profiles, contain four basic attributes like username, email, first name and last name. The addition of any attributes (or removing some default attributes) required you to create a custom theme. Now custom themes may not be needed because users see exactly the requested attributes based on the requirement of the particular deployment.
Validations - Ability to specify validators for the user attributes including built-in validators that you can use to specify a maximum or minimum length, a specific regex, or limiting a particular attribute to be a URL or number.
Annotations - Ability to specify that particular attribute should be rendered for instance as a text area, an HTML select with specified options, or calendar or many other options. You can also bind JavaScript code to a specific field to change how an attribute is rendered and customize its behavior.
Progressive profiling - Ability to specify that some fields are required or available on the forms just for particular values of scope parameter. This effectively allow progressive profiling. You no longer need to ask the user for twenty attributes during registration; you can instead ask the user to fill in attributes incrementally according to the requirements of the individual client applications that are used by the user.
Migration from previous versions - The user profile is now always enabled, but it operates as before for those who did not use this feature. You can benefit from the user profile capabilities, but you are not required to use them. For migration instructions, see the Upgrading Guide.

The first release of the user profile as a supported feature is just the starting point and the baseline for delivering many more capabilities around identity management.

We would like to give huge thanks to the awesome Keycloak community as lots of ideas, requirements and contributions came from the community! Special thanks to:

For more details about user profile capabilities, see the Server Administration Guide.

Breaking changes to the User Profile SPI

In this release, changes to the User Profile SPI might impact existing implementations based on this SPI. For more details, see the Upgrading Guide.

Changes to Freemarker templates to render pages based on the user profile and realm

In this release, the following templates were updated to make it possible to dynamically render attributes based on the user profile configuration set to a realm:

login-update-profile.ftl
register.ftl
update-email.ftl

For more details, see the Upgrading Guide.

In this release, the server renders the update profile page when the user is authenticating through a broker for the first time using the idp-review-user-profile.ftl template.

For more details, see the Upgrading Guide.

Java adapter deprecation and removal

Back in 2022 we announced the deprecation of Keycloak adapters in Keycloak 19. To give the community more time to adopt this was delayed.

With that in mind, this will be the last major release of Keycloak to include OpenID Connect and SAML adapters. As Jetty 9.x has not been supported since 2022 the Jetty adapter has been removed already in this release.

The generic Authorization Client library will continue to be supported, and aims to be used in combination with any other OAuth 2.0 or OpenID Connect libraries.

The only adapter we will continue to deliver is the SAML adapter for latest releases of WildFly and EAP 8.x. Reasoning for continuing to support this is down to the fact that the majority of the SAML codebase in Keycloak was a contribution from WildFly. As part of this contribution we agreed to maintain SAML adapters for WildFly and EAP in the long run.

Jetty adapter removed

Jetty 9.4 has not been supported in the community for a long time, and reached end-of-life in 2022. At the same time the adapter has not been updated or tested with more recent versions of Jetty. For these reasons the Jetty adapter has been removed from this release.

New Welcome Page

The 'welcome' page that appears at the first use of Keycloak is redesigned. It provides a better setup experience and conforms to the latest version of PatternFly. The simplified page layout includes only a form to register the first administrative user. After completing the registration, the user is sent directly to the Admin Console.

If you use a custom theme, you may need to update it to support the new welcome page. For details, see the Upgrading Guide.

New Account Console now the default

We introduced version 3 of the Account Console in Keycloak 22 as a preview feature. In this release, we are making it the default version, and deprecating version 2 in the process, which will be removed in a subsequent release.

This new version has built-in support for the user profile feature, which allows administrators to configure which attributes are available to users in the Account Console, and lands a user directly on their personal account page after logging in.

If you are using or extending the customization features of this theme, you may need to perform additional migrations. For more details, see the Upgrading Guide.

Keycloak JS

Using `exports` field in `package.json`

The Keycloak JS adapter now uses the exports field in its package.json. This change improves support for more modern bundlers like Webpack 5 and Vite, but comes with some unavoidable breaking changes. See the Upgrading Guide for more details.

PKCE enabled by default

The Keycloak JS adapter now sets the pkceMethod option to S256 by default. This change enables Proof Key Code Exchange (PKCE) for all applications using the adapter. If you use the adapter on a system that does not support PKCE, you can set the pkceMethod option to false to disable it.

Changes to Password Hashing

In this release, we adapted the password hashing defaults to match the OWASP recommendations for Password Storage.

As part of this change, the default password hashing provider has changed from pbkdf2-sha256 to pbkdf2-sha512. Also, the number of default hash iterations for pbkdf2 based password hashing algorithms changed. This change means better security aligned with latest recommendations, but it has impact on performance. It is possible to stick to the old behaviour by adding password policies hashAlgorithm and hashIterations to your realm. For more details, see the Upgrading Guide.

Lightweight access tokens support

This release contains support for Lightweight access tokens. As a result, you can have smaller access tokens for specified clients. These tokens have only a few claims, which is why they are smaller. Note that lightweight access token is still JWT signed by the realm key by default and still contains some very basic claims.

This release introduces an Add to lightweight access token flag that is available on some OIDC protocol mappers. Use this flag to specify if a particular claim should be added to a lightweight access token. It is OFF by default, which means that most claims are not added.

Also, a client policy executor exists. Use it to specify if a particular client request should use lightweight access tokens or regular access tokens. An alternative to the executor is to use an Always use lightweight access token flag on client advanced settings, which causes that client to always use lightweight access tokens. An executor can be an alternative if you need more flexibility. For instance, you may choose to use lightweight access tokens by default but use regular tokens only for the specified scope parameter.

A previous release added an Add to token introspection switch. You use it to add claims that are not present in the access token into the introspection endpoint response.

Thanks to Shigeyuki Kabano for the contribution and Thanks to Takashi Norimatsu for a help and review of this feature.

OAuth 2.1 support

This release contains optional OAuth 2.1 support. New client policy profiles were introduced in this release, which administrators can use to make sure that clients and particular client requests comply with the OAuth 2.1 specification. A dedicated client profile exists for confidential clients and a dedicated profile for public clients. Thanks to Takashi Norimatsu and Shigeyuki Kabano for the contribution.

Scope parameter supported in the refresh token flow

Starting with this release, the scope parameter in the OAuth2/OIDC endpoint for token refresh is supported. Use this parameter to request access tokens with a smaller amount of scopes than originally granted, which means you cannot increase access token scope. This scope limitation does not affect the scope of the refreshed refresh token. This function works as described in the OAuth2 specification. Thanks to Konstantinos Georgilakis for the contribution.

Client policy executor for secure redirect URIs

A new client policy executor secure-redirect-uris-enforcer is introduced. Use it to restrict which redirect URIs can be used by the clients. For instance, you can specify that client redirect URIs cannot have wildcards, should be just from specific domain, must be OAuth 2.1 compliant, and so on. Thanks to Lex Cao and Takashi Norimatsu for the contribution.

Client policy executor for enforcing DPoP

A new client policy executor dpop-bind-enforcer is introduced. You can use it to enforce DPoP for a particular client if dpop preview is enabled. Thanks to Takashi Norimatsu for the contribution.

Supporting EdDSA

You can create EdDSA realm keys and use them as signature algorithms for various clients. For instance, you can use these keys to sign tokens or for client authentication with signed JWT. This feature includes identity brokering where Keycloak itself signs client assertions that are used for private_key_jwt authentication to third party identity providers. Thanks to Takashi Norimatsu and Muhammad Zakwan Bin Mohd Zahid for the contribution.

EC Keys supported by JavaKeystore provider

The provider JavaKeystoreProvider for providing realm keys now supports EC keys in addition to previously supported RSA keys. Thanks to Stefan Wiedemann for the contribution.

Option to add X509 thumbprint to JWT when using private_key_jwt authentication for identity providers

OIDC identity providers now have the Add X.509 Headers to the JWT option for the situation when client authentication with JWT signed by private key is used. This option can be useful for interoperability with some identity providers such as Azure AD, which require the thumbprint to be present on the JWT. Thanks to MT for the contribution.

OAuth Grant Type SPI

The Keycloak codebase includes an internal update to introduce the OAuth Grant Type SPI. This update allows additional flexibility when introducing custom grant types supported by the Keycloak OAuth 2 token endpoint. Thanks to Dmitry Telegin for the contribution.

CORS improvements

The CORS related Keycloak functionality was extracted into the SPI, which can allow additional flexibility. Note that CorsSPI is internal and may change at a future release. Thanks to Dmitry Telegin for the contribution.

Truststore improvements

Keycloak introduces improved truststores configuration options. The Keycloak truststore is now used across the server, including outgoing connections, mTLS, and database drivers. You no longer need to configure separate truststores for individual areas. To configure the truststore, you can put your truststores files or certificates in the default conf/truststores, or use the new truststore-paths config option. For details refer to the relevant guide.

Versioned Features

Features now support versioning. To preserve backward compatibility, all existing features (including account2 and account3) are marked as version 1. Newly introduced features will use versioning, which means that users can select between different implementations of desired features.

For details refer to the features guide.

Keycloak CR Truststores

You may also take advantage of the new server-side handling of truststores by using the Keycloak CR, for example:

spec:
  truststores:
    mystore:
      secret:
        name: mystore-secret
    myotherstore:
      secret:
        name: myotherstore-secret

Currently only Secrets are supported.

Trust Kubernetes CA

The cert for the Kubernetes CA is added automatically to your Keycloak Pods managed by the Operator.

Automatic certificate management for SAML identity providers

The SAML identity providers can now be configured to automatically download the signing certificates from the IDP entity metadata descriptor endpoint. In order to use the new feature, configure the Metadata descriptor URL option in the provider (the URL where the IDP metadata information with the certificates is published) and set Use metadata descriptor URL to ON. The certificates are automatically downloaded and cached in the public-key-storage SPI from that URL. The certificates can also be reloaded or imported from the Admin Console, using the action combo in the provider page.

See the documentation for more details about the new options.

Non-blocking health check for load balancers

A new health check endpoint available at /lb-check was added. The execution is running in the event loop, which means this check is responsive also in overloaded situations when Keycloak needs to handle many requests waiting in request queue. This behavior is useful, for example, in multi-site deployment to avoid failing over to another site that is under heavy load. The endpoint is currently checking availability of the embedded and external Infinispan caches. Other checks may be added later.

This endpoint is not available by default. To enable it, run Keyloak with the multi-site feature. For more details, see Enabling and disabling features.

Keycloak CR Optimized Field

The Keycloak CR now includes an startOptimized field, which may be used to override the default assumption about whether to use the --optimized flag for the start command. As a result, you can use the CR to configure build time options also when a custom Keycloak image is used.

Enhanced reverse proxy settings

It is now possible to separately enable parsing of either Forwarded or X-Forwarded-* headers by using the new --proxy-headers option. For details, see the Reverse Proxy Guide. The original --proxy option is now deprecated and will be removed in a future release. For migration instructions, see the Upgrading Guide.

Changes to the user representation in both Admin API and Account contexts

In this release, we are encapsulating the root user attributes (such as username, email, firstName, lastName, and locale) by moving them to a base/abstract class in order to align how these attributes are marshalled and unmarshalled when using both Admin and Account REST APIs.

This strategy provides consistency in how attributes are managed by clients and makes sure they conform to the user profile configuration set to a realm.

For more details, see the Upgrading Guide.

Sequential loading of offline sessions and remote sessions

Starting with this release, the first member of a Keycloak cluster will load remote sessions sequentially instead of in parallel. If offline session preloading is enabled, those will be loaded sequentially as well.

For more details, see the Upgrading Guide.

Performing actions on behalf of another already authenticated user is not longer possible

In this release, you can no longer perform actions such as email verification if the user is already authenticated and the action is bound to another user. For instance, a user can not complete the verification email flow if the email link is bound to a different account.

Changes to the email verification flow

In this release, if a user tries to follow the link to verify the email and the email was previously verified, a proper message will be shown.

In addition to that, a new error (EMAIL_ALREADY_VERIFIED) event will be fired to indicate an attempt to verify an already verified email. You can use this event to track possible attempts to hijack user accounts in case the link has leaked or to alert users if they do not recognize the action.

Deprecated offline session preloading

The default behavior of Keycloak is to load offline sessions on demand. The old behavior to preload them at startup is now deprecated, as pre-loading them at startup does not scale well with a growing number of sessions, and increases Keycloak memory usage. The old behavior will be removed in a future release.

For more details, see the Upgrading Guide.

Configuration option for offline session lifespan override in memory

To reduce memory requirements, we introduced a configuration option to shorten lifespan for offline sessions imported into the Infinispan caches. Currently, the offline session lifespan override is disabled by default.

For more details, see the Server Administration Guide.

Infinispan metrics use labels for cache manager and cache names

When enabling metrics for Keycloak’s embedded caches, the metrics now use labels for the cache manager and the cache names.

For more details, see the Upgrading Guide.

User attribute value length extension

As of this release, Keycloak supports storing and searching by user attribute values longer than 255 characters, which was previously a limitation.

For more details, see the Upgrading Guide.

Brute Force Protection changes

There have been a couple of enhancements to the Brute Protection:

When an attempt to authenticate with an OTP or Recovery Code fails due to Brute Force Protection the active Authentication Session is invalidated. Any further attempts to authenticate with that session will fail.
In previous versions of Keycloak, the administrator had to choose between disabling users temporarily or permanently due to a Brute Force attack on their accounts. The administrator can now permanently disable a user after a given number of temporary lockouts.
The property failedLoginNotBefore has been added to the brute-force/users/{userId} endpoint

Authorization Policy

In previous versions of Keycloak, when the last member of a User, Group or Client policy was deleted then that policy would also be deleted. Unfortunately this could lead to an escalation of privileges if the policy was used in an aggregate policy. To avoid privilege escalation the effect policies are no longer deleted and an administrator will need to update those policies.

Keycloak CR cache-config-file option

The Keycloak CR now allows for specifying the cache-config-file option by using the cache spec configMapFile field, for example:

apiVersion: k8s.keycloak.org/v2alpha1
kind: Keycloak
metadata:
  name: example-kc
spec:
  ...
  cache:
    configMapFile:
      name: my-configmap
      key: config.xml

Keycloak CR resources options

The Keycloak CR now allows for specifying the resources options for managing compute resources for the Keycloak container. It provides the ability to request and limit resources independently for the main Keycloak deployment via the Keycloak CR, and for the realm import Job via the Realm Import CR.

When no values are specified, the default requests memory is set to 1700MiB, and the limits memory is set to 2GiB.

You can specify your custom values based on your requirements as follows:

apiVersion: k8s.keycloak.org/v2alpha1
kind: Keycloak
metadata:
  name: example-kc
spec:
  ...
  resources:
    requests:
      cpu: 1200m
      memory: 896Mi
    limits:
      cpu: 6
      memory: 3Gi

For more details, see the Operator Advanced configuration.

Temporary lockout log replaced with event

There is now a new event USER_DISABLED_BY_TEMPORARY_LOCKOUT when a user is temporarily locked out by the brute force protector. The log with ID KC-SERVICES0053 has been removed as the new event offers the information in a structured form.

For more details, see the Upgrading Guide.

Updates to cookies

Cookie handling code has been refactored and improved, including a new Cookie Provider. This provides better consistency for cookies handled by Keycloak, and the ability to introduce configuration options around cookies if needed.

SAML User Attribute Mapper For NameID now suggests only valid NameID formats

User Attribute Mapper For NameID allowed setting Name ID Format option to the following values:

urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.1:nameid-format:X509SubjectName
urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.1:nameid-format:WindowsDomainQualifiedName
urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:nameid-format:kerberos
urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:nameid-format:entity

However, Keycloak does not support receiving AuthnRequest document with one of these NameIDPolicy, therefore these mappers would never be used. The supported options were updated to only include the following Name ID Formats:

urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.1:nameid-format:emailAddress
urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.1:nameid-format:unspecified
urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:nameid-format:persistent
urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:nameid-format:transient

Different JVM memory settings when running in a container

Instead of specifying hardcoded values for the initial and maximum heap size, Keycloak uses relative values to the total memory of a container. The JVM options -Xms and -Xmx were replaced by -XX:InitialRAMPercentage and -XX:MaxRAMPercentage.

It can significantly impact memory consumption, so executing particular actions might be required.

For more details, see the Upgrading Guide.

GELF log handler has been deprecated

With sunsetting of the underlying library providing integration with GELF, Keycloak will no longer support the GELF log handler out-of-the-box. This feature will be removed in a future release. If you require an external log management, consider using file log parsing.

Support for multi-site active-passive deployments

Deploying Keycloak to multiple independent sites is essential for some environments to provide high availability and a speedy recovery from failures. This release supports active-passive deployments for Keycloak.

To get started, use the High Availability Guide which also includes a comprehensive blueprint to deploy a highly available Keycloak to a cloud environment.

Keycloak 23.0.0

OpenID Connect / OAuth 2.0

FAPI 2 drafts support

Keycloak has new client profiles fapi-2-security-profile and fapi-2-message-signing, which ensure Keycloak enforces compliance with the latest FAPI 2 draft specifications when communicating with your clients. Thanks to Takashi Norimatsu for the contribution.

DPoP preview support

Keycloak has preview for support for OAuth 2.0 Demonstrating Proof-of-Possession at the Application Layer (DPoP). Thanks to Takashi Norimatsu and Dmitry Telegin for their contributions.

More flexibility for introspection endpoint

In previous versions, introspection endpoint automatically returned most claims, which were available in the access token. Now most of protocol mappers include a new Add to token introspection switch . This addition allows more flexibility because an introspection endpoint can return different claims than an access token. This change is a first step towards "Lightweight access tokens" support because access tokens can omit lots of the claims, which would be still returned by the introspection endpoint. When migrating from previous versions, the introspection endpoint should return same claims, which are returned from access token, so the behavior should be effectively the same by default after the migration. Thanks to Shigeyuki Kabano for the contribution.

Feature flag for OAuth 2.0 device authorization grant flow

The OAuth 2.0 device authorization grant flow now includes a feature flag, so you can easily disable this feature. This feature is still enabled by default. Thanks to Thomas Darimont for the contribution.

Authentication

Passkeys support

Keycloak has preview support for Passkeys.

Passkey registration and authentication are realized by the features of WebAuthn. Therefore, users of Keycloak can do Passkey registration and authentication by existing WebAuthn registration and authentication.

Both synced Passkeys and device-bound Passkeys can be used for both Same-Device and Cross-Device Authentication. However, Passkeys operations success depends on the user’s environment. Make sure which operations can succeed in the environment. Thanks to Takashi Norimatsu for the contribution and thanks to Thomas Darimont for the help with the ideas and testing of this feature.

WebAuthn improvements

WebAuthn policy includes a new field: Extra Origins. It provides better interoperability with non-Web platforms (for example, native mobile applications). Thanks to Charley Wu for the contribution.

You are already logged-in

This release addresses an issue concerning when a user has a login page open in multiple browser tabs and authenticated in one browser tab. When the user tries to authenticate in another browser tab, a message appears: You are already logged-in. This is improved now as other browser tabs automatically authenticate the user after authentication in the first tab. However, more improvements are still needed. For example, when an authentication session expires and is restarted in one browser tab, other browser tabs do not follow automatically with the login.

Password policy for specify Maximum authentication time

Keycloak supports a new password policy that allows you to specify the maximum age of an authentication with which a password may be changed by a user without re-authentication. When this password policy is set to 0, the user is required to re-authenticate to change the password in the Account Console or by other means. You can also specify a lower or higher value than the default value of 5 minutes. Thanks to Thomas Darimont for the contribution.

Deployments

Preview support for multi-site active-passive deployments

Deploying Keycloak to multiple independent sites is essential for some environments to provide high availability and a speedy recovery from failures. This release adds preview-support for active-passive deployments for Keycloak.

A lot of work has gone into testing and verifying a setup which can sustain load and recover from the failure scenarios. To get started, use the High Availability Guide which also includes a comprehensive blueprint to deploy a highly available Keycloak to a cloud environment.

Adapters

OpenID Connect WildFly and JBoss EAP

OpenID Connect adapter for WildFly and JBoss EAP, which was deprecated in previous versions, has been removed in this release. It is being replaced by the Elytron OIDC adapter,which is included in WildFly, and provides a seamless migration from Keycloak adapters.

SAML WildFly and JBoss EAP

The SAML adapter for WildFly and JBoss EAP is no longer distributed as a ZIP download, but rather a Galleon feature pack, making it easier and more seamless to install.

See the Securing Applications and Services Guide for the details.

Server distribution

Load Shedding support

Keycloak now features http-max-queued-requests option to allow proper rejecting of incoming requests under high load. For details refer to the production guide.

RESTEasy Reactive

Keycloak has switched to RESTEasy Reactive. Applications using quarkus-resteasy-reactive should still benefit from a better startup time, runtime performance, and memory footprint, even though not using reactive style/semantics. SPIs that depend directly on JAX-RS API should be compatible with this change. SPIs that depend on RESTEasy Classic including ResteasyClientBuilder will not be compatible and will require an update. This update will also be needed for other implementation of the JAX-RS API like Jersey.

User profile

Declarative user profile is still a preview feature in this release, but we are working hard on promoting it to a supported feature. Feedback is welcome. If you find any issues or have any improvements in mind, you are welcome to create Github issue, ideally with the label area/user-profile. It is also recommended to check the Upgrading Guide with the migration changes for this release for some additional informations related to the migration.

Group scalability

Performance around searching of groups is improved for the use-cases with many groups and subgroups. There are improvements, which allow paginated lookup of subgroups. Thanks to Alice for the contribution.

Themes

Localization files for themes default to UTF-8 encoding

Message properties files for themes are now read in UTF-8 encoding, with an automatic fallback to ISO-8859-1 encoding.

See the migration guide for more details.

Storage

Removal of the Map Store

The Map Store has been an experimental feature in previous releases. Starting with this release, it is removed and users should continue to use the current JPA store. See the migration guide for details.

Keycloak 22.0.3

Security vulnerability when registering or updating user through templates

A security vulnerability was introduced in Keycloak 22.0.2. We highly recommend not upgrading to 22.0.2, and for anyone that has deployed 22.0.2 in production to upgrade to 22.0.3 immediately.

For users that has self-registered after Keycloak was upgraded to 22.0.2 their password is not stored securely, and can be exposed to administrators of Keycloak. This only affects users that has registered after the upgrade was rolled-out, and does not affect any previously registered users.

Any realm using the preview declarative user profile is not affected by this issue, and only realms using the default user profile provider is affected.

To identify if there are any affected users in your deployment you can query these by accessing the database, and running the following SQL statement:

SELECT DISTINCT U.ID, U.USERNAME, U.EMAIL, U.REALM_ID FROM USER_ENTITY U
    INNER JOIN USER_ATTRIBUTE UA ON U.ID = UA.USER_ID
    WHERE UA.NAME IN ('password','password-confirm')

We recommend contacting any affected users as well as adding the update password required action for them.

If there are any affected users we also recommend removing these attributes from the database by running the following SQL statement:

DELETE FROM USER_ATTRIBUTE UA WHERE UA.NAME IN ('password','password-confirm')

If any backups have been done of the database after the 22.0.2 release and there are affected users, we recommend deleting these.

Custom user storage providers

Any deployments with custom user storage federation providers may also be affected if the provider is delegating to Keycloak storing user attributes, please verify your custom user storage to identify if this is an issue.

To identify if there are any federated user affected in your deployment, you can query these by accessing the database, and running the following SQL statement:

SELECT DISTINCT USER_ID,REALM_ID,STORAGE_PROVIDER_ID FROM FED_USER_ATTRIBUTE
    WHERE NAME IN ('password','password-confirm')

If there are any affected federated users, we also recommend removing these attributes from the database by running the following SQL statement:

DELETE FROM FED_USER_ATTRIBUTE UA WHERE UA.NAME IN ('password','password-confirm')

If your custom user storage provider is managing attributes itself, you should look at your custom storage to remove the password and password-confirm attributes.

Keycloak 22.0.2

Improvements in LDAP and Kerberos integration

Keycloak now supports multiple LDAP providers in a realm, which support Kerberos integration with the same Kerberos realm. When an LDAP provider is not able to find the user which was authenticated through Kerberos/SPNEGO, Keycloak ties to fallback to the next LDAP provider. Keycloak has also better support for the case when single LDAP provider supports multiple Kerberos realms, which are in trust with each other.

Keycloak 22.0.0

Server Distribution

Java 11 support removed

Running the Keycloak server with Java 11 is no longer supported. Java 11 was deprecated in Keycloak 21 with the announced plan to be removed in Keycloak 22.

Upgrade to Quarkus 3.x

Keycloak upgraded to version 3.2.0.Final of the Quarkus Java framework. Quarkus 3.x continues the tradition of propelling Java development by moving fast and providing a cutting-edge user experience with the latest technologies.

Transition from Java EE to Jakarta EE

As part of upgrading to Quarkus 3.x Keycloak migrated its codebase from Java EE (Enterprise Edition) to its successor Jakarta EE, which brings various changes into Keycloak. We have upgraded all Jakarta EE specifications in order to support Jakarta EE 10.

Context and dependency injection no longer enabled to JAX-RS Resources

In order to provide a better runtime and leverage as much as possible the underlying stack, all injection points for contextual data using the javax.ws.rs.core.Context annotation were removed. The expected improvement in performance involves no longer creating proxies instances multiple times during the request lifecycle, and drastically reducing the amount of reflection code at runtime.

Upgrade to Hibernate ORM 6

Keycloak now benefits from the upgrade to Hibernate ORM 6.2, which includes improved performance, better SQL, modern JDK support, and support for modern RDBMS features.

Elytron credential store replacement

The previous and now removed WildFly distribution provided a built-in vault provider that reads secrets from a keystore-backed Elytron credential store. As this is no longer available, we have added a new implementation of the Keycloak Vault SPI called Keycloak KeyStore Vault. As the name suggests, this implementation reads secrets from a Java keystore file. Such secrets can be then used within multiple places of the Administration Console. For further details, see our guide and the latest documentation.

KeyStore Config Source added

In relation to the KeyStore Vault news, we also integrated Quarkus’s recently released feature called KeyStore Config Source. This means that among the already existing configuration sources (CLI parameters, environment variables and files), you can now configure your Keycloak server via configuration properties stored in a Java keystore file. You can learn more about this feature in the Configuration guide.

Hostname debug tool

As a number of users have had problems with configuring the hostname for the server correctly there is now a new helper tool to allow debugging the configuration.

Passthrough proxy mode changes

Installations which use Keycloak’s --proxy configuration setting with mode passthrough should review the documentation as the behavior of this mode has changed.

Export and Import perform an automatic build

In previous releases, the export and import commands required a build command to be run first. Starting with this release, the export and import commands perform an automatic rebuild of Keycloak if a build time configuration has changed.

Admin Console

Account Console v1 removal

The old Account Console (v1) is now completely removed. This version of the Account Console was marked as deprecated in Keycloak 12.

Account Console v3 promoted to preview

In version 21.1.0 of Keycloak the new Account Console (version 3) was introduced as an experimental feature. Starting this version it has been promoted to a preview feature.

Account Console template variables removed

Two of the variables exposed to the Account Console V2 and V3 templates (isEventsEnabled and isTotpConfigured) were left unused, and have been removed in this release.

It is possible that if a developer extended the Account Console theme, he or she could make use of these variables. So make sure that these variables are no longer used if you are extending the base theme.

Changes to custom Admin Console messages

The Admin Console (and soon also the new Account Console) works slightly different than the rest of Keycloak in regards to how keys for internationalized messages are parsed. This is due to the fact that it uses the i18next library for internationalization. Therefore when defining custom messages for the Admin Console under "Realm Settings" ➡ "Localization" best practices for i18next must be taken into account. Specifically, when defining a message for the Admin Console it is it important to specify a namespace in the key of your message.

For example, let’s assume we want to overwrite the welcome message shown to the user when a new realm has been created. This message is located in the dashboard namespace, same as the name of the original file that holds the messages (dashboard.json). If we wanted to overwrite this message we’ll have to use the namespace as a prefix followed by the key of the message separated by a colon, in this case it would become dashboard:welcome.

JavaScript adapter

Legacy Promise API removed

With this release, we have removed the legacy Promise API methods from the Keycloak JS adapter. This means that calling .success() and .error() on promises returned from the adapter is no longer possible.

Required to be instantiated with the `new` operator

In a previous release we started to actively log deprecation warnings when the Keycloak JS adapter is constructed without the new operator. Starting this release doing so will throw an exception instead. This is to align with the expected behavior of JavaScript classes, which will allow further refactoring of the adapter in the future.

Admin API

Renamed Admin library artifacts

After the upgrade to Jakarta EE, artifacts for Keycloak Admin clients were renamed to more descriptive names with consideration for long-term maintainability. We still provide two separate Keycloak Admin clients, one with Jakarta EE and the other with Java EE support.

Support for count users based on custom attributes

The User API now supports querying the number of users based on custom attributes. For that, a new q parameter was added to the /{realm}/users/count endpoint.

The q parameter expects the following format q=<name>:<value> <name>:<value>. Where <name> and <value> represent the attribute name and value, respectively.

Operator

k8s.keycloak.org/v2alpha1 changes

The are additional fields available in the keycloak.status to facilitate keycloak being a scalable resource. There are also additional fields that make the status easier to interpret such as observedGeneration and condition observedGeneration and lastTransitionTime fields.

The condition status field was changed from a boolean to a string for conformance with standard Kubernetes conditions. In the CRD it will temporarily be represented as accepting any content, but it will only ever be a string. Please make sure any of your usage of this field is updated to expect the values "True", "False", or "Unknown", rather than true or false.

Co-management of Operator Resources

In scenarios where advanced management is needed you may now directly update most fields on operator managed resources that have not been set by the operator directly. This can be used as an alternative to the unsupported stanza of the Keycloak spec. Like the unsupported stanza these direct modifications are not considered supported. If your modifications prevent the operator from being able to manage the resource, there Keycloak CR will show this error condition and the operator will log it.

Identity Brokering

Essential claim configuration in OpenID Connect identity providers

OpenID Connect identity providers support a new configuration to specify that the ID tokens issued by the identity provider must have a specific claim, otherwise the user can not authenticate through this broker.

The option is disabled by default; when it is enabled, you can specify the name of the JWT token claim to filter and the value to match (supports regular expression format).

Support for JWE encrypted ID Tokens and UserInfo responses in OpenID Connect providers

The OpenID Connect providers now support Json Web Encryption (JWE) for the ID Token and the UserInfo response. The providers use the realm keys defined for the selected encryption algorithm to perform the decryption.

Hardcoded group mapper

The new hardcorded group mapper allows adding a specific group to users brokered from an Identity Provider.

User session note mapper

The new user session note mapper allows mapping a claim to the user session notes.

LDAP Federation

LDAPS-only Truststore option removed

LDAP option to use truststore SPI Only for ldaps has been removed. This parameter is used to select truststore for TLS-secured LDAP connection: either internal Keycloak truststore is picked (Always), or the global JVM one (Never).

Deployments where Only for ldaps was used will automatically behave as if Always option was selected for TLS-secured LDAP connections.

Removed Openshift integration feature

The openshift-integration preview feature that allowed replacing the internal IdP in OpenShift 3.x with Keycloak was removed from Keycloak codebase into separate extension project.

Keycloak 21.1.2

Changes in validating schemes for valid redirect URIs

If an application client is using non http(s) custom schemes, from now on the validation requires that a valid redirect pattern explicitly allows that scheme. Example patterns for allowing custom scheme are custom:/test, custom:/test/* or custom:*. For security reasons a general pattern like * does not cover them anymore.

Keycloak 21.1.0

Monorepo

In the past Keycloak was maintained across multiple GitHub repositories:

Having multiple repositories introduced a lot of complexity and toil. For example frequently multiple pull requests had to be sent to different repositories for a single change.

To simplify things we have now migrated everything into the main repository.

FIPS 140-2 support

FIPS 140-2 support in Keycloak, which was preview in the previous release, is now promoted to be officially supported.

Experimental Account Console version 3

The Account Console version 3 is now available as an experimental feature in Keycloak. This version supports custom fields created with the 'User Profile' feature. If you are looking to try it out and provide us with some early feedback you can enable it as follows:

bin/kc.sh start-dev --features=account3

Changes to Keycloak Authorization Services support in Keycloak Java-based Adapters

As part of the removal of the deprecated adapters, the Keycloak Policy Enforcer was extracted from the adapters code base into a separate dependency:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.keycloak</groupId>
    <artifactId>keycloak-policy-enforcer</artifactId>
    <version>21.1.0</version>
</dependency>

By providing this dependency, we expect making it possible to integrate the policy enforcer with the Java stack of your preference.

It also provides built-in support for enabling the policy enforcer to Jakarta applications protected with Wildfly Elytron.

For now, this dependency is not yet GA as we are still working on the quickstarts and documentation.

This work should not impact existing applications using the deprecated adapters. = Javascript engine available by default

In the previous version, when Keycloak was used on Java 17 with Javascript providers it was needed to add the Nashorn javascript engine to the distribution. This is no longer needed as Nashorn javascript engine is available in Keycloak server by default.

Keycloak 21.0.0

Old Admin Console removed

In Keycloak 19 the new admin console was graduated to the new default admin console, and the old admin console was deprecated. In this release the old admin console has been removed completely.

Keycloak uses Micrometer for metrics

Keycloak provides an optional a metrics endpoint which exports metrics in the Prometheus format. In this release the implementation to provide this data switched from SmallRye to Micrometer. Due to this change, metrics have been renamed.

See the migration guide for details.

Java 11 support for Keycloak server deprecated

Running the Keycloak server with Java 11 is now deprecated, and planned to be removed in Keycloak 22.

Adapters remain supported on Java 8, Java 11, and Java 17. However, we are planning to remove support for Java 8 in the not too distant future.

Hashicop Vault no longer supported

We removed the out-of-box support for Hashicorp vault in this release.

See this discussion for more details.

SAML SP metadata changes

Prior to this release, SAML SP metadata contained the same key for both signing and encryption use. Starting with this version of Keycloak, we include only encryption intended realm keys for encryption use in SP metadata. For each encryption key descriptor we also specify the algorithm that it is supposed to be used with. The following table shows the supported XML-Enc algorithms with the mapping to Keycloak realm keys. See the Upgrading Guide for more details.

XML-Enc algorithm

Keycloak realm key algorithm

rsa-oaep-mgf1p

RSA-OAEP

rsa-1_5

RSA1_5

Deprecated methods from user session provider were removed

Several deprecated methods were removed from user session provider. If not done already, their usage needs to be replaced with the corresponding replacement documented in Javadoc of Keycloak 20 release. See Upgrading Guide for more details.

New storage: `IS_CLIENT_ROLE` searchable field was deprecated

The IS_CLIENT_ROLE searchable field from the RoleModel was deprecated. It should be replaced with the CLIENT_ID searchable field used with the operators EXISTS or NOT_EXISTS. See JavaDoc of Keycloak 21 for more details.

FIPS 140-2 preview support

FIPS 140-2 support in Keycloak, which was experimental in the previous release, is now promoted to preview. There were many fixes and improvements to create this preview version. For the details, see the FIPS documentation. Feedback is welcome!

Thanks again to David Anderson, Sudeep Das and Isaac Jensen for their huge help with this feature.

Support for the standard `Forwarded` header when running behind a reverse proxy

In addition to recognize the non-standard X-Forwarded-* to fetch information added by proxies that would otherwise be altered or lost when proxy servers are involved in the path of the request, Keycloak can now leverage the standard Forwarded header for the same purpose.

For more details, see the Using a reverse proxy guide.

Please, make sure your proxy is also overriding the Forwarded header when making requests to Keycloak nodes.

The container image is now based on ubi9-micro

To enhance security, the Keycloak Container Image has been modified in two ways: First, it is now based on UBI9, rather than UBI8. Second, we have switched to -micro, whereas -minimal was used before.

The change to UBI9 will not have any impact on most users. In rare cases the glibc error CPU does not support x86-64-v2 may appear. x86-64-v2 has been available from processors since 2009. You’re most likely to encounter this issue when your virtualization environment is misconfigured.

The change from -minimal to -micro has more potential impact. Users making simple customizations to the image won’t notice any difference, however any user that installs RPMs will need to change how they do that. The Running Keycloak in a container guide has been updated to show you how.

As a result of these changes, there has been an 82% reduction in known CVEs affecting the Keycloak Container Image!

Other improvements

Option to disable client registration access token rotation. Thanks to Réda Housni Alaoui

Keycloak 20.0.0

WildFly distribution removed

In Keycloak 17.0.0 the new Quarkus based distribution of Keycloak, while the WildFly based distribution was deprecated. With this release the WildFly distribution has been removed, and is no longer supported.

If you are still using the WildFly distribution we highly encourage migrating to the Quarkus distribution as soon as possible, see the Migration Guide for more details.

New Keycloak Operator upgrade

We are happy to announce that the new Keycloak Operator for the Quarkus based distribution is no longer a preview feature. We added new functionality as well as a number of improvements, some which has resulted in breaking changes.

Realm Operator

As the new Operator currently lacks some of the CRs (e.g. Client and User), we’re introducing a temporary workaround in the form of a Realm Operator. Please see its GitHub Repository for more details. See also "The future of Keycloak Operator CRs" blogpost.

Supported OpenJDK versions

Keycloak now supports OpenJDK 17 both for the server and adapters.

With the removal of the WildFly based distribution there is no longer support for running the Keycloak server on OpenJDK 8. We also plan to remove support for Keycloak adapters on OpenJDK 8 in Keycloak 21.

Starting with Keycloak 22 we plan to only support the latest OpenJDK LTS release and aiming to quickly also support the latest OpenJDK release. That means we will be also removing OpenJDK 11 support for the Keycloak server in Keycloak 22.

Hostname provider now supports configuring the complete base URL

In this release, we are introducing two additional server options to set the base URL for frontend request and the Admin Console:

hostname-url
hostname-admin-url

More details can be found at the Configuring the Hostname guide.

Improvements to `kc.bat` when running Keycloak on Windows

In this release, we are making important changes to kc.bat to give the same experience as when running on Linux.

Upgrade of embedded H2 database

Keycloak ships for development purposes with an H2 database driver. As it is intended for development purposes only, it should never be used in a production environment.

In this release, the H2 driver has been upgraded from version 1.x to version 2.x.

Feature guard for hosting the Keycloak JavaScript adapter

Applications are able to load keycloak.js directly from the Keycloak server. As it’s not considered a best-practice to load JavaScript libraries this way there is now a feature guard that allows disabling this ability.

In Keycloak 21 we will deprecate this option, and in Keycloak 22 we plan to completely remove the ability to load keycloak.js from the Keycloak server.

OTP Application SPI

In previous releases the list of OTP applications displayed to users was hard-coded in Keycloak. With the introduction of the OTP Application SPI it is now possible to disable built-in OTP applications, as well as adding custom OTP Applications.

Custom Identity Providers can now set an icon for the provider

A custom identity provider can now set the icon used on the login pages. Thanks to Klaus Betz, who happens also to maintain an extension to Keycloak to support log in with AppleID.

FIPS 140-2 experimental support

There is now experimental support for deploying Keycloak into a FIPS 140-2 enabled environment. There will be a blog post with the details shortly after the release with the details how you can try it. Feedback is welcome!

Thanks to David Anderson, who contributed parts of this feature. Also, thanks to Sudeep Das and Isaac Jensen for their initial prototype effort, which was used as an inspiration.

Search groups by attribute

It is now possible to search groups by attribute through the Admin REST API. Thanks to Alice for this contribution.

View group membership in the account console

It is now possible to allow users to view their group memberships in the account console. Thanks to cgeorgilakis for this contribution.

Deprecated methods from data providers and models were removed

Several deprecated methods were removed from data providers and models. If not done already, their usage needs to be replaced with the corresponding replacement documented in Javadoc of Keycloak 19 release. See Upgrading Guide for more details.

Keycloak 19.0.0

OpenID Connect and SAML Adapters End-of-life

Some Keycloak OpenID Connect adapters have reached end-of-life and are not included in this release.

Fuse 6 and 7 (OpenID Connect)

Keycloak will no longer be providing adapters for Fuse 6 or 7. If you need adapters for Fuse please leverage Red Hat Single Sign-On 7.x adapters.

JBoss AS 7 and EAP 6 (OpenID Connect and SAML)

JBoss AS 7 has been unmaintained for a very long time. If you are still using JBoss AS 7 we recommend migrating to WildFly and leveraging the native OIDC support in WildFly.

Red Hat customers using Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6.x should use Red Hat Single Sign-On 7.x adapters. These can be used in combination with the Keycloak server.

Jetty 9.2 and 9.3 (OpenID Connect and SAML)

Jetty 9.2 reached end of life in 2018, while Jetty 9.3 reached end of life in 2020. If you are still using these versions we recommend upgrading to Jetty 9.4 as soon as possible.

Spring Boot 1 (OpenID Connect)

Spring Boot 1.x reached end of life in 2019. If you are still using Spring Boot 1 we recommend upgrading to Spring Boot 2 as soon as possible.

WildFly legacy security layer (OpenID Connect and SAML)

In WildFly 25 the legacy security layer was removed, going forward only Elytron will be supported. We recommend anyone using an older version of WildFly to upgrade and leverage native OIDC support in WildFly.

Red Hat customers using Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 7.x should use Red Hat Single Sign-On 7.x adapters. These can be used in combination with the Keycloak server.

New Admin Console graduation

The new Admin Console is now graduated to the default admin console, with the old console now deprecated. The old console will be removed in Keycloak 21.

Changes in Keycloak storage

The Keycloak storage is changing, and the current storage, while still supported, will eventually be replaced with a brand-new implementation. This change brings better support for cloud-native storages, no-downtime abilities, and better support for implementing custom storages for additional areas apart from users.

It means several deep changes in the supported features of the current store will become legacy features. The legacy store and the new store cannot be used simultaneously; only one store can be active at a time.

The most visible change is that the User Storage SPI is incompatible with the new storage API, the Map Storage API. Thus, the User Storage SPI will be deprecated with legacy store and will move to a separate module called keycloak-model-legacy. This change impacts several areas, especially areas related to user federation and custom user providers.

Furthermore, APIs have been consolidated so that the details of the storage layer will be transparent to the REST service layer. Specifically, the services will not be able to differentiate cached and non-cached objects, nor specifically access federated versus local storage.

Hence, custom extensions that access objects in local storage or cache through KeycloakSession methods must be reviewed. See Upgrading Guide for details.

OIDC Logout changes

In the previous release, we added support for OIDC logout. This release contains a few other fixes and polishing. The highlights include:

Support for the client_id parameter, which was added in recent draft of the OIDC RP-Initiated Logout specification. As a result, no need exists to use the Consent Required flag of the client to show the logout confirmation screen.
Configuration option Valid Post Logout Redirect URIs added to the OIDC client. This change is aligned with the OIDC specification, which allows you to use a different set of redirect URIs for redirect after login and logout. Value + used for Valid Post Logout Redirect URIs means that the logout will use the same set of redirect URIs as specified by the option of Valid Redirect URIs. This change also matches the default behavior when migrating from a previous version due to backwards compatibility.

For more details, see the Server Administration Guide.

Update Email Workflow

There is new preview feature UPDATE_EMAIL. When it is enabled and corresponding flag enabled in the realm, the users will be required to confirm updating their email by clicking the link, which will be sent to their new email address. For more details, see the Server Administration Guide. Thanks to Réda Housni Alaoui for the contribution.

Deprecated `podDisruptionBudget` in the legacy Keycloak Operator

With this release, we have deprecated podDisruptionBudget field in the Keycloak CR of the legacy Keycloak Operator. This optional field will be ignored when the Operator is deployed on Kubernetes version 1.25 and higher.

As a workaround, you can manually create the Pod Disruption Budget in your cluster, for example:

apiVersion: policy/v1
kind: PodDisruptionBudget
metadata:
  labels:
    app: keycloak
  name: keycloak
spec:
  maxUnavailable: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      component: keycloak

Initial Support for centralized logging

Starting with version 19, Keycloak supports sending logs using GELF to centralized logging solutions like ELK, EFK or Graylog out of the box.

You can find the documentation and examples to get you up and running quickly in the logging guide.

Keycloak 18.0.0

New Operator preview

With this release, we’re introducing a brand new Keycloak Operator as a preview. Apart from being rewritten from scratch, the main user-facing change from the legacy Operator is the used Keycloak distribution – the new Operator uses the Quarkus distribution of Keycloak. With that, the API (in form of Custom Resource Definitions) has changed. For details, incl. installation and migration instructions, see the Operator related guides.

The legacy Operator will receive updates until Keycloak 20 when the Keycloak WildFly distribution reaches EOL.

OperatorHub versioning scheme

To avoid version conflicts with the legacy Operator, the 18.0.0 version of the new Operator is released as version 20.0.0-alpha.1 on OperatorHub. The legacy Operator versioning scheme remains the same, i.e. it is released as 18.0.0.

The same pattern will apply for future Keycloak 18 and 19 releases, until version 20 where the legacy Operator reaches EOL.

New Admin Console preview

The new Admin Console is now graduated to preview, with the plan for it to become the default admin console in Keycloak 19.

If you find any issues with the new console, or have some suggestions for improvements, please let us know through GitHub Discussions.

Step-up authentication

Keycloak now supports Step-up authentication. This feature was added in Keycloak 17, and was further polished in this version.

For more details, see Server Administration Guide.

Thanks to Cornelia Lahnsteiner and Georg Romstorfer for the contribution.

Client secret rotation

Keycloak now supports Client Secret Rotation through customer policies. This feature is now available as a preview feature and allows that confidential clients can be provided with realm policies allowing the use up to two secrets simultaneously.

For more details, see Server Administration Guide.

Recovery Codes

Recovery Codes as another way to do two-factor authentication is now available as a preview feature.

OpenID Connect Logout Improvements

Some fixes and improvements were made to make sure that Keycloak is now fully compliant with all the OpenID Connect logout specifications:

OpenID Connect RP-Initiated Logout 1.0
OpenID Connect Front-Channel Logout 1.0
OpenID Connect Back-Channel Logout 1.0
OpenID Connect Session Management 1.0

For more details, see Server Administration Guide.

WebAuthn improvements

Keycloak now supports WebAuthn id-less authentication. This feature allows that WebAuthn Security Key will identify the user during authentication as long as the security key supports Resident Keys. For more details, see Server Administration Guide. Thanks to Joaquim Fellmann for the contribution.

There are more WebAuthn improvements and fixes in addition to that.

The deprecated `upload-script` feature was removed

The upload-script feature has been marked as deprecated for a very long time. In this release, it was completely removed, and it is no longer supported.

If you are using any of these capabilities:

OpenID Connect Script Mapper
Script Authenticator (Authentication Execution)
JavaScript Policies

You should consider reading this documentation in order to understand how to still rely on these capabilities but deploying your scripts to the server rather than managing them through the management interfaces.

Session limits

Keycloak now supports limits on the number of sessions a user can have. Limits can be placed at the realm level or at the client level.

For more details, see Server Administration Guide. Thanks to Mauro de Wit for the contribution.

SAML ECP Profile is disabled by default

To mitigate the risk of abusing SAML ECP Profile, Keycloak now blocks this flow for all SAML clients that do not allow it explicitly. The profile can be enabled using Allow ECP Flow flag within client configuration, see Server Administration Guide.

Quarkus distribution

Import realms at startup

The Keycloak Quarkus distribution now supports importing your realms directly at start-up. For more information, check the corresponding guide.

JSON and File Logging improvements

The Keycloak Quarkus distribution now initially supports logging to a File and logging structured data using JSON.

For more information on the improvements, check the corresponding Logging guide.

Environment variable expansion for values in keycloak.conf

The Keycloak Quarkus distribution now supports expanding values in keycloak.conf from environment variables.

For more information, check the corresponding guide.

New Option db-url-port

You can now change the port of your jdbc connection string explicitly by setting the new db-url-port configuration option. As for the other convenience options, this option will be overridden by the value of a full db-url, if set.

Split metrics-enabled option into health-enabled and metrics-enabled

The metrics-enabled option now only enables the metrics for Keycloak. To enable the readiness and liveness probe, there’s the new build option health-enabled. This allows more fine-grained usage of these options.

Other improvements

Account console alignments with latest PatternFly release.
Support for encrypted User Info endpoint response. Thanks to Giacomo Altiero
Support for the algorithm RSA-OAEP with A256GCM used for encryption keys. Thanks to Filipe Bojikian Rissi
Support for login with GitHub Enterprise server. Thanks to Neon Ngo

Keycloak 17.0.0

Highlights

Quarkus distribution is now fully supported

The default Keycloak distribution is now based on Quarkus. The new distribution is faster, leaner, and a lot easier to configure!

We appreciate migrating from the WildFly distribution is not going to be straightforward for everyone, since how you start and configure Keycloak has radically changed. With that in mind we will continue to support the WildFly distribution until June 2022.

For information on how to migrate to the new distribution check out the Quarkus Migration Guide.

Quarkus distribution updates

A lot of effort went into polishing and improving the Quarkus distribution to make it as good as an experience as possible. A few highlights include:

A new approach to documentation in form of server guides to help you install and configure Keycloak
Upgraded Quarkus to 2.7.0.Final
Configuration file is no longer Java specific, and aligns configuration keys with CLI arguments
Clearer separation between build options and runtime configuration.
h2-mem and h2-file databases renamed to dev-mem and dev-file.
Simplified enabling and disabling features
Custom, and unsupported, Quarkus configuration is done through conf/quarkus.properties.
Ability to add custom Java Options via JAVA_OPTS_APPEND (thanks to dasniko)
Initial logging capabilities
Initial support for Cross-DC
User-defined profiles are no longer supported but using different configuration files to achieve the same goal
Quickstarts updated to use the new distribution == Other improvements

Offline sessions lazy loaded

The offline sessions are now lazily fetched from the database by default instead of preloading during the server startup. To change the default behavior, see Server Administration Guide.

Improved User Search

Keycloak now supports a glob-like syntax for the user search when listing users in the Admin Console, which allows for three different types of searches: prefix (foo* which became the default search), infix (*foo*), and exact "foo")

Keycloak 16.1.0

Highlights

Upgrade to Wildfly 26.0.0

Keycloak server was upgraded to use Wildfly 26.0.0.Final as the underlying container.

For more information on WildFly 26 refer to the WildFly 26 release notes.

Keycloak 16.0.0

Highlights

Upgrade to Wildfly 25.0.1

Keycloak server was upgraded to use Wildfly 25.0.1.Final as the underlying container.

WildFly 25 drops support for the legacy security subsystem, which is being replaced fully by Elytron. This requires significant changes to how Keycloak is configured. Please, refer to the migration guide for more details.

For more information on WildFly 25 refer to the WildFly 25 release notes.

Upgrade to Quarkus 2.5.3

Keycloak.X Quarkus preview distribution was upgraded to Quarkus 2.5.3.

Keycloak 15.1.0

Highlights

Quarkus distribution preview

Without comparison the biggest highlight of this release is all the improvements that have been made to the Quarkus distribution. So many in fact, that it will be hard to list them all.

The CLI has been polished to hell and back, and we believe it now provides a very simple and convenient approach to configuring and running Keycloak. It’s almost so simple that documentation shouldn’t be needed.

To get started, just unpack the distribution, then type bin/kc.[sh|bat] -h to discover awesomeness!

That doesn’t mean we don’t plan to provide documentation for configuring Keycloak, but it didn’t quite make it this time around. In lack of documentation expect a blog post to follow the release introducing all the changes to the Quarkus distribution, as well as an overview on how to use it.

We are rapidly moving towards making the Quarkus distribution our default distribution, and will soon deprecate the WildFly distribution. With this in mind it is important that as many people as possible give it a test-run and provide us with feedback if you find any usability issues, are not able to configure something with it, or if you discover any bugs.

We’d love to hear your thoughts and get your feedback in GitHub Discussions!

New Admin Console preview

The new admin console is shaping up really nicely, and a preview is included in the main distribution. It is not quite feature complete yet, but there are still loads of things to try out.

WildFly update

Upgrading from WildFly 23 to WildFly 25 has taken a lot longer than we would have liked. We’re still working hard on this and are hoping to release Keycloak 16 as soon as possible with the upgrade, but as we wanted to get the updates to the Quarkus distribution out there we are doing this release in the meantime.

WildFly adapter deprecation

In WildFly 25 there is now excellent native OpenID Connect support without the need for the Keycloak adapter. With this in mind we are deprecating our WildFly adapter and will not support WildFly 25, but it will be around for a while for older WildFly versions and Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 7.y.

Spring Security and Boot adapter deprecation

A long time ago, with Spring Security 5.0, there is now native support for OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect in Spring. With this in mind now is the time to start deprecating our Spring Boot and Security adapters.

OpenID Connect Front-Channel Logout Support

Keycloak now supports OpenID Connect Front-Channel Logout 1.0.

For more details, take a look at Server Administration Guide.

Thanks to Ronaldo Yamada for the contribution.

Deprecated features in the Keycloak Operator

With this release, we have deprecated and/or marked as unsupported some features in the Keycloak Operator. This concerns the Backup CRD and the operator managed Postgres Database.

Keycloak 15.0.1

Highlights

This release contains some important bug fixes. In addition, We would like to thank Leandro José de Bortoli for his contributions to the FAPI related functionalities such as JARM support and improvements in CIBA.

Keycloak 15.0.0

Highlights

Financial-grade API (FAPI) Improvements, FAPI CIBA and Open Banking Brasil

The Keycloak server has improved support for the Financial-grade API (FAPI). More specifically, Keycloak is now compliant with FAPI CIBA and with OpenBanking Brasil. We also have support for CIBA ping mode. Thanks to Takashi Norimatsu, who did most of the work on FAPI CIBA and who is continually doing a really awesome job for the Keycloak project. Also thanks to Dmytro Mishchuk, Andrii Murashkin, Hryhorii Hevorkian and Leandro José de Bortoli, who did a great deal of the work on the FAPI compliance as well. Finally thanks to all the members of the FAPI Special interest group for their help and feedback.

Keycloak 14.0.0

Highlights

Client Policies and Financial-grade API (FAPI) Support

The Keycloak server has now official support for client policies and Financial-grade API (FAPI). This capability was previewed in earlier versions, but now it is more polished and properly documented. Thanks to Takashi Norimatsu, who did most of the work on this. Also thanks to Dmytro Mishchuk, Andrii Murashkin and Hryhorii Hevorkian, who did a great deal of the work on this feature as well. Finally thanks to all the members of the FAPI Special interest group for their help and feedback.

Improvements to User Profile SPI and support for declarative configuration

In this version, there were several improvements to the User Profile SPI in order to prepare the ground on how users profiles are managed in Keycloak.

One of these improvements is the support for configuring user profiles through the administration console. For more details proceed to Server Administration Guide

Thanks to the community and all the individuals involved in this effort.

Improvements to offline sessions

Offline session preloading has been improved and should be faster thanks to Peter Flintholm.

As a preview feature, offline session preloading can be skipped in favor of lazy loading thanks to Thomas Darimont's efforts. This feature has to be explicitly activated in the server configuration, see Server administration guide for details.

Other improvements

The support for configuring maximum number of active authentication sessions. The default value is set to 300 authentication sessions (browser tabs) per a browser’s session

Keycloak 13.0.0

Highlights

Upgrade to Wildfly 23

The Keycloak server was upgraded to use Wildfly 23.0.2.Final as the underlying container.

OAuth 2.0 Device Authorization Grant (RFC 8628)

Support for OAuth 2.0 Device Authorization Grant is now available.

Thanks to Hiroyuki Wada, Łukasz Dywicki and Michito Okai.

OpenID Connect Client Initiated Backchannel Authentication (CIBA)

Support for OpenID Connect Client Initiated Backchannel Authentication (CIBA) is now available.

Thanks to Takashi Norimatsu, Andrii Murashkin, Christophe Lannoy and members of the FAPI WG for the implementation and feedback.

SAML Artifact binding in server to client communication

Keycloak now supports communication with clients using SAML Artifact binding. A new Force Artifact Binding option was introduced in the client configuration, that forces communication with the client using artifact messages. For more details proceed to Server Administration Guide. Please note, that with this version, Keycloak SAML client adapter does NOT support Artifact binding.

Thanks to AlistairDoswald and harture.

Support PKCE for identity brokering

Keycloak can now leverage PKCE when brokering to an external OpenID Connect IdP.

Thanks to thomasdarimont.

Default roles processing improvement

Default roles are now internally stored as composite roles of a new role usually named default-roles-<realmName>. Instead of assigning both realm and all client default roles directly to newly created users or users imported through Identity Brokering, just the role is assigned to them and the rest of default roles are assigned as effective roles. This change improves performance of default roles processing, especially with larger number of clients, because it is no longer necessary to go through all clients.

Keycloak 12.0.0

Highlights

Keycloak.X distribution preview

Introduction a preview of the new and upcoming Keycloak.X distribution. This distribution is powered by Quarkus, bringing significant improvements to startup time and memory consumption, as well as making it a lot easier to configure Keycloak.

New Account console is now the default

The new account console is no longer a preview feature and is now the default account console in Keycloak. The old account console will stay around for a while. For those that have a custom theme for the old account console the old console will be used by default, giving you the time to update your custom theme to the new account console.

OpenID Connect Back-Channel Logout

Support for OpenID Connect Back-Channel Logout is now available, thanks to DaSmoo and benjamin37.

Upgrade to Wildfly 21

The Keycloak server was upgraded to use Wildfly 21 as the underlying container.

Ability to request AuthnContext in SAML identity provider

Support for specification of AuthnContext section in authentication requests issued by SAML identity provider has been added.

Thanks to lscorcia

FAPI RW support and initial support to Client policies

There was lots of the work done to have support for Financial-grade API Read and Write API Security Profile (FAPI RW). This is available with the usage of Client policies and it is still in the preview state. You can expect more polishing in the next releases. Thanks to Takashi Norimatsu and all the members of the FAPI Special interest group.

The Keycloak login theme components have been upgraded to PatternFly 4. The old PatternFly 3 runs simultaneously with the new one, so it’s possible to have PF3 components there.

There are also design changes in the login theme for better user experience. You can even define an icon for your custom Identity providers. For details, please refer to the docs.

Gatekeeper EOL

Gatekeeper reached end of life, in November 21. This means that we no longer support, or update it. The announcement is available here.

Other improvements

Support for OAuth2 Client Credentials grant without refresh token and without user session. Thanks to Thomas Darimont
Support for send access tokens to the OAuth2 Revocation endpoint

Keycloak 11.0.0

Highlights

LDAPv3 password modify operation

Support for LDAPv3 password modify operation was added. Also the ability in the admin console to request metadata from the configured LDAP server to see if it supports LDAPv3 password modify operation.

Thanks to cachescrubber

Namespace support for LDAP group mapper

Namespace support for LDAP group mapper allows you to map groups from LDAP under specified branch (namespace) of the Keycloak groups tree. Previously groups from LDAP were always added as the top level groups in Keycloak.

Thanks to Torsten Juergeleit

Upgrade to WildFly 20

Keycloak server was upgraded to use WildFly 20.0.1.Final under the covers. For more details, please take a look at Upgrading Guide.

SAML POST binding is broken in the latest versions of browsers

The SameSite value None for JSESSIONID cookie is necessary for correct behavior of the Keycloak SAML adapter. Usage of a different value is causing resetting of the container’s session with each request to Keycloak, when the SAML POST binging is used. Refer to the following steps for Wildfly and Tomcat to keep the correct behavior. Notice, that this workaround should be working also with the previous versions of the adapter.

Other improvements

Support for client offline session lifespan. Thanks to Yoshiyuki Tabata
Czech translation. Thanks to Jakub Knejzlík
Possibility to fetch additional fields from the Facebook identity provider. Thanks to Bartosz Siemieńczuk
Support for AES 192 and AES 256 algorithms used for signed and encrypted ID tokens. Thanks to Takashi Norimatsu
Ability to specify signature algorithm in Signed JWT Client Authentication. Thanks to Takashi Norimatsu

Keycloak 10.0.0

Highlights

Identity Brokering Sync Mode

With Identity Brokering Sync Mode it is now possible to control if user profiles are updated on first login, or every login from an external Identity Provider. It is also possible to override this behaviour on individual mappers.

Thanks to Martin Idel

Client Session Timeout for OpenID Connect / OAuth 2.0

Typically, an SSO session last for days if not months, while individual client sessions should ideally be a lot shorter. With the introduction of client session timeout it is now possible to configure a separate timeout for individual clients, as well as a default for all clients within a realm.

Thanks to Yoshiyuki Tabata

OAuth 2.0 Token Revocation (RFC 7009)

For applications that use Keycloak as an OAuth 2.0 Authorization Server there is now support to revoke refresh tokens through the token revocation endpoint.

Thanks to Yoshiyuki Tabata

Security Headers SPI and Response Filter

A new SPI was introduced to allow better flexibility when setting security related headers on responses. This provides a cleaner implementation within Keycloak, but also allows full customisation if needed. Security headers are now set by a response filter instead of within the code itself, which makes it less error-prone, removing the chance that some response are missing headers.

Upgrade to WildFly 19

Keycloak server was upgraded to use WildFly 19 under the covers.

Other improvements

Support for invoking Application Initiated Actions added to Keycloak JavaScript adapter
Performance improvements to fetching resources and policies during evaluation

Keycloak 9.0.1

Highlights

PromiseType removed from JavaScript adapter

The promiseType init option has been removed from the JavaScript adapter. Instead a promise that supports both native promise API and legacy Keycloak promise API is returned. This allows gradually migration of applications from the legacy/deprecated API to the native promise API.

Other improvements

Reverted breaking API changes to LocaleSelectorSPI

In 9.0.0 a breaking API change was introduced to LocaleSelectorSPI. With 9.0.1 the changes to this API is now reverted, and a new LocaleUpdaterSPI has been introduced.

Fixed the automatic resolution of `KeycloakConfigResolver` instances for Spring Boot Applications

In previous releases, Spring Boot applications had to manually implement the KeycloakConfigResolver interface or extend the built-in org.keycloak.adapters.springboot.KeycloakSpringBootConfigResolver.

This release fixes the backward compatibility issue by resolving instances automatically in case none is provided. As well as still allowing applications to provide their own configuration resolver implementations.

Keycloak 9.0.0

Highlights

Drools Policy Removed

The Drools Policy was finally removed after the deprecation period. If you need more complex policies you can still use JavaScript-based policies.

Pagination support for clients

Pagination support was added to clients in the Admin Console and REST API. Thanks to saibot94.

New Elytron Credential Store Vault Provider

A new built-in vault provider that reads secrets from a keystore-backed Elytron credential store has been added as a WildFly extension. The creation and management of the credential store is handled by Elytron using either the elytron subsystem or the elytron-tool.sh script.

More updates to W3C WebAuthn and Authentication flows

In this release, we did some usability improvements to the authentication flows. It should be easier for the end user to choose between available authentication mechanisms for two-factor authentication. It should be more intuitive to log in with OTP or WebAuthn considering the fact that user can have more OTP or WebAuthn credentials. There is also better support for passwordless WebAuthn authentication. Finally, we did some work on defects related to the authentication flows.

Improved handling of user locale

A number of improvements have been made to how the locale for the login page is selected, as well as when the locale is updated for a user.

Other improvements

Authorization Header token is only considered now when type is Bearer on Gatekeeper. Thanks to HansK-p
More algorithms are supported for the client authentication with signed client secret JWT. Namely HS384 and HS512 algorithms were added. Thanks to tnorimat

Keycloak 8.0.2

Highlights

Starting with version 80, Google Chrome will change the default value for the SameSite cookie parameter to Lax. Therefore, changes were required to several Keycloak cookies (especially those which are used within the Javascript adapter for checking the session status using the iframe) to set SameSite parameter to None. Please note that this setting also requires setting the Secure parameter, hence starting with this version, the Javascript adapter will only be fully functional when using the SSL / TLS connection on the Keycloak side.

Keycloak 8.0.1

Highlights

LDAP Issue

This release fixes a critical vulnerability in LDAP introduced in Keycloak 7. If you are using Keycloak 7.0.0, 7.0.1 or 8.0.0 in production we strongly suggest that you upgrade immediately.

WildFly 18.0.1.Final

Upgrade to WildFly 18.0.1.Final which includes updates to a number of CVEs in third-party libraries.

Keycloak 8.0.0

Highlights

Vault

Several configuration fields can obtain their value from a vault instead of entering the value directly: LDAP bind password, SMTP password, and identity provider secrets.

Furthermore, new vault SPI has been introduced to enable development of extensions to access secrets from custom vaults.

New Default Hostname provider

The fixed and request hostname providers have been replaced with a single new default hostname provider. This provider comes with a number of improvements, including:

No need to change provider to set fixed base URL
Support different base URL for frontend and backend requests
Support changing context-path in cases where Keycloak is exposed on a different context-path through a reverse proxy

Messages in theme resources

Message bundles in theme resources enables internationalization of custom providers such as authenticators. They are also shared between all theme types, making it possible to for example share messages between the login and account console. Thanks to micedre.

RoleMappingsProvider SPI for the SAML adapters

We have added a new SPI that allows for the configuration of custom role mappers that are used by the SAML adapters to map the roles extracted from the SAML assertion into roles that exist in the SP application environment. This is particularly useful when the adapters need to communicate with third party IDPs and the roles set by the IDP in the assertion do not correspond to the roles that were defined for the SP application. The provider to be used can be configured in the keycloak-saml.xml file or in the keycloak-saml subsystem. An implementation that performs the role mappings based on the contents of a properties file was also provided.

Notice that when Keycloak acts as the IDP we can use the built-in role mappers to perform any necessary mappings before setting the roles into the assertion, so this SPI will probably be redundant in this case. The RoleMappingsProvider SPI was designed for situations when the IDP offer no way to map roles before adding them to the assertion.

WildFly 18 Upgrade

Keycloak server was upgraded to use WildFly 18 under the covers.

W3C Web Authentication support

In this release, we added initial support for W3C Web Authentication (WebAuthn). There are a few limitations in current implementation, however we are working on further improvements in this area. Thanks to tnorimat for the contribution. Also thanks to ynojima for the help and feedback.

Support for password-less authentication, multi-factor authentication and multiple credentials per user

With the arrival of W3C Web Authentication support, we’ve refined the authentication flow system to be able to allow a user to select which authentication method is preferred for login (for example, the choice between an OTP credential and a WebAuthn credential). The new mechanisms also allow an administrator to craft flows for password-less login, for example just using WebAuthn as an authentication method. Please note that with these changes, any custom authentication flow you have created may need to be adapted to the new flow logic.

As a result of these changes, users can now have multiple OTP devices and multiple WebAuthn devices. The same system that allows a user to select which type of device to use during login also allows that user to select which specific device to use. Thanks to the Cloudtrust team: AlistairDoswald, sispeo and Fratt for their contributions, and to harture and Laurent for their help.

Other Improvements

System properties and environment variables support in theme.properties

It is now possible to use system properties and environment variables within theme.properties file. Thanks to Opa-

Support more signing algorithms for client authentication with signed JWT

Thanks to tnorimat, we support more signing algorithms for client authentication with signed JWT.

Configurable client authentication method for OIDC Identity providers

In this release, possibility to authenticate OIDC providers with signed JWT or basic authentication was added. So all the client authentication methods mentioned in the OIDC specification are supported now. Thanks to madgaet and rradillen for contributions.

Support enable/disable logging into the JavaScript adapter

Thanks to jonkoops now it’s possible to enable or disable logging for the JS adapter.

Credentials support removed from the JavaScript adapter

The option to provide client credentials in the JavaScript adapter was removed. Thanks to jonkoops

Updates for Gatekeeper

Secure token and logout endpoint were included in Gatekeeper. Thanks to fredbi
There was a bug on Gatekeeper which was making cookies to be applied to subdomains. Thanks to daniel-ac-martin the issue was fixed
Now Gatekeeper provides support to Same-site cookies. Thanks to fiji-flo

Deploying Scripts to the Server

Please take a look at 7.0.1 Release Notes for more details on how you can now deploy and run scripts to customize specific behavior.

Keycloak 7.0.1

Deploying Scripts to the Server

Until now, administrators were allowed to upload scripts to the server through the Keycloak Administration Console as well as through the RESTful Admin API.

For now on, this capability is disabled by default and users should prefer to deploy scripts directly to the server. For more details, please take a look at JavaScript Providers.

Keycloak 7.0.0

Highlights

WildFly 17 Upgrade

Keycloak server was upgraded to use WildFly 17 under the covers.

Tomcat 9 adapter support

Java adapter for Apache Tomcat 8 and Apache Tomcat 9 was unified and now it serves for both of them.

New Account Console

A lot of work has been done on the new Account Console and Account REST API. It’s not quite ready yet, but it’s getting there and hopefully will be fully done for Keycloak 8.

Signed and Encrypted ID Token Support

Keycloak can support the signed and encrypted ID token according to the Json Web Encryption (JWE) specification. Thanks to tnorimat.

Testing and release automation

The Keycloak team has spent a significant amount of time on automation around testing and releases both for Keycloak and Red Hat Single Sign-On.

Other improvements

PKCE support added to JavaScript adapter. Thanks to thomasdarimont
Oracle database support added to Keycloak container image. Thanks to nerdstep
Clock Skew support added to SAML adapter. Thanks to steevebtib
TypeScript support for Node.js adapter. Thanks to evanshortiss
Gatekeeper now allows to provide unencrypted token in header, while encrypting in cookie. There was also a bug on Gatekeeper when Revoke Refresh Token is enabled on the Keycloak server. The issue was fixed. Thanks to fredbi
New tab in the Admin console to display the list of users for client roles. Thanks to unly

Keycloak 6.0.0

WildFly 16 Upgrade

Keycloak server was upgraded to use WildFly 16 under the covers.

SmallRye Health and Metrics extensions

Keycloak now comes enabled with the SmallRye Health and Metrics extensions which provides standard health and metrics endpoints. We will add some documentation as well as Keycloak specific metrics soon.

PS256 support

Thanks to tnorimat Keycloak now has support for signing and verifying tokens with PS256.

MP-JWT Client Scope

New built-in client scope to make it easy to issue tokens following the Eclipse MicroProfile specification.

Keycloak 5.0.0

WildFly 15 Upgrade

Keycloak server was upgraded to use WildFly 15 under the covers.

Keycloak 4.8.0.Final

OpenShift Integration

It is now possible to fully secure OpenShift 3.11 with Keycloak, including the ability to automatically expose Service Accounts as OAuth clients as clients to Keycloak.

This is currently a technology preview feature.

Rules/Drools Policy Marked as a Technology Preview Feature

Until now, Drools policies were enabled by default. But now, this policy type is only available as a technology preview feature and to use it you need to enable the preview profile or the corresponding feature. Take a look at the Authorization Services Guide for more details.

Support for DB2 removed

DB2 support has been deprecated for a while. With this release we have removed all support for DB2.

Keycloak 4.7.0.Final

Enhanced Remember Me

Introduced the ability to specify different session idle and max timeouts for remember me sessions. This enables remember me sessions to live longer than regular sessions.

Pagination support for Groups

Large numbers of groups have previously caused issues in the admin console. This is now resolved by the introduction of pagination of groups.

Improve startup time with large number of offline sessions

In the past, starting the server could take a long time if there were many offline sessions. This startup time has now been significantly reduced.

Keycloak 4.6.0.Final

Upgrade to WildFly 14

The Keycloak server was upgraded to use WildFly 14 under the covers.

Keycloak Gatekeeper

Keycloak Gatekeeper provides a security proxy that can be used to secure applications and services without an adapter. It can be installed locally alongside your application or as a sidecar on OpenShift or Kubernetes.

Huge thanks to gambol99 for contributing this work to Keycloak.

Keycloak 4.5.0.Final

Signature SPI

The Signature SPI makes it possible to plug-in additional signature algorithms. This enables additional signatures and also enables changing how signatures are generated. For example, using this allows using an HSM device to sign tokens.

Thanks to tnorimat for contributing a significant part of this work.

New Signature Algorithms

Alongside the Signature SPI there is now also support for additional signature algorithms.

Keycloak now has support for RS256, RS384, RS512, ES256, ES384, ES512, HS256, HS384 and HS512.

Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ES256/384/512) are very interesting as they provide similar security properties as RSA signatures, but use significantly less CPU.

HMAC (HS256/384/512) are also very useful when you do not want your application to verify the signature itself. Since these are symmetric signatures only Keycloak is able to verify the signature, which requires the application to use the token introspection endpoint to verify tokens.

Thanks to tnorimat for contributing a significant part of this work.

Better Audience Support for OpenID Connect clients

It is now possible to specify the audiences in the tokens issued for OpenID Connect clients. There is also support for verification of audience on the adapter side.

Minor improvements

Added LocaleSelector SPI, which allows to change the way how the locale will be resolved for a particular request. Thanks to knutz3n
Added an authenticator to automatically link Identity Provider identity to an existing account after first Idp authentication. Thanks to slominskir

Keycloak 4.4.0.Final

Upgrade to WildFly 13

The Keycloak server was upgraded to use WildFly 13 under the covers. This means update of the underlying dependencies and also some changes in the configuration. We now also support WildFly 13 adapter and we upgraded the underlying JDG/Infinispan server version for the Cross-DC setup. See Upgrading Guide for more details.

Authorization Services support in Node.js

Having authorization services support in Node.js makes it very easy to do fine-grained central authorization with the Node.js adapter.

Minor improvements

Update design for the welcome page
Allow passing current locale to OAuth2 IdPs. Thanks to knutz3n
Support Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only security header. Thanks to knutz3n
Script based ProtocolMapper for SAML. Thanks to AlistairDoswald

Keycloak 4.3.0.Final

Hostname SPI

The hostname SPI introduces a more flexible way to configure the hostname for Keycloak. There are two built-in providers. The first is request, which uses the request headers to determine the hostname. The second is fixed, which allows configuring a fixed hostname. The latter makes sure that only valid hostnames can be used and also allows internal applications to invoke Keycloak through an alternative URL.

For more details refer to the threat mitigation section in the Server Administration Guide.

X509 Client Authenticator

The newly added Client Authenticator uses X509 Client Certificates and Mutual TLS to secure a connection from the client. In addition to that the Keycloak Server validates Subject DN field of the client’s certificate.

Performance improvements to Authorization Services

For this release, we improved policy evaluation performance across the board, increasing reliability and throughput. The main changes we did were related with trying to optimize the policy evaluation path by avoiding unnecessary flows and collect decisions as soon as they happen. We also introduced a policy decision cache on a per-request basis, avoiding redundant decisions from policies previously evaluated.

We are also working on other layers of cache which should give a much better experience. See KEYCLOAK-7952.

Choosing the response mode when obtaining permissions from the server

In previous versions, permissions were always returned from the server using standard OAuth2 response, containing the access and refresh tokens. In this release, clients can use a response_mode parameter to specify how the server should respond to an authorization request. This parameter accepts two values:

decision

Indicating that responses should only contain a flag indicating whether or not permissions were granted by the server. Otherwise a 403 HTTP status code is returned.
permissions

Indicating that a response should contain every single permission granted by the server using a JSON format.

NodeJS Policy Enforcer

The keycloak-nodejs-connect, an adapter for NodeJS, now supports constructs to protect resources based on decisions taken from the server. The new construct allows users to protect their resources using fine-grained permissions as follows:

app.get('/protected/resource', keycloak.enforcer('resource:view'), function (req, res) {
  res.json({message: 'access granted'});
});

Support hosted domain for Google logins

Login with Google now supports the hd parameter to restrict Google logins to a specific hosted domain at Google. When this is specified in the identity provider any login from a different domain is rejected.

Thanks to brushmate for the contribution.

Escape unsafe tags in HTML output

Most HTML output is already escaped for HTML tags, but there are some places where HTML tags are permitted. These are only where admin access is needed to update the value. Even though it would require admin access to update such fields we have added an extra layer of defence and are now escaping unsafe elements like <script>.

Keycloak 4.2.0.Final

Browser tab support for Cordova

We now have support for using browser tab and universal links in the JavaScript adapter for Cordova. This enables SSO between multiple applications as well as increases security.

Thanks to gtudan for the contribution.

SAML adapter multitenancy support

The SAML adapter can support multi-tenancy now just like the built-in adapter for OpenID Connect.

An option to create claims with dots (.) in them

In previous versions, it was not possible to create claims in the token using a claim name containing a dot (.) character. Now it is possible to escape the dot character in the configuration, so a claim name with the dot character can be used.

Keycloak 4.1.0.Final

Making Spring Boot 2 the default starter

Starting with release 4.1, the Spring Boot starter will be based on the Spring Boot 2 adapter. If you are using an older Spring Boot version, the keycloak-legacy-spring-boot-starter is available.

Keycloak 4.0.0.Final

Client Scopes and support for OAuth 2 scope parameter

We added support for Client Scopes, which replaces Client Templates. Client Scopes are a more flexible approach and also provides better support for the OAuth scope parameter.

There are changes related to Client Scopes to the consent screen. The list on the consent screen is now linked to client scopes instead of protocol mappers and roles.

See the documentation and migration guide for more details.

OAuth 2 Certificate Bound Access Tokens

We now have a partial implementation of the specification OAuth 2.0 Mutual TLS Client Authentication and Certificate Bound Access Tokens . More accurately we have support for the Certificate Bound Access Tokens. If your confidential client is able to use 2-way SSL, Keycloak will be able to add the hash of the client certificate into the tokens issued for the client. At this moment, it’s just the Keycloak itself, which verifies the token hashes (for example during refresh token requests). We plan to add support to adapters as well. We also plan to add support for Mutual TLS Client Authentication.

Thanks to tnorimat for the contribution.

Authorization Services

UMA 2.0 Support

UMA 2.0 is now supported for Authorization Services. Check the documentation for more details if you are coming from previous versions of Keycloak.

User-Managed Access through the Keycloak Account Service

Now end-users are able to manage their resources and the permissions associated with them through the Keycloak Account Service. From there, resource owners can now check their resources, share resources with another users as well approve requests from other users.

Asynchronous Authorization Flow

When using UMA, client applications can now choose whether or not an authorization request should start an authorization flow to ask for the resource owner approval. This functionality allows applications to ask for resource owner approval when trying to access one of his resources on behalf of another user.

User-Managed Permission API

Resource servers are now capable of associating additional policies to resources owned by a particular user. The new API provides operations to manage these permissions using different policy types such as role, group, user, client or a condition using JavaScript.

Pushed Claims

Clients applications are now able to send arbitrary claims to Keycloak along with an authorization request in order to evaluate permissions based on these claims. This is a very handy addition when access should be granted (or denied) in the scope of a specific transaction or based on information about the runtime.

Resource Attributes

It is now possible to associated attributes with resources protected by Keycloak and use these same attributes to evaluate permissions from your policies.

Policy enforcer now accepts regular access tokens

In some situations, you may want to just send regular access tokens to a resource server but still be able to enforce policies on these resources.

One of the main changes introduced by this release is that you are no longer required to exchange access tokens with RPTs in order to access resources protected by a resource server (when not using UMA). Depending on how the policy enforcer is configured on the resource server side, you can just send regular access tokens as a bearer token and permissions will still be enforced.

Policy enforcer can now load resources from the server on-demand

Until now, when deploying an application configured with a policy-enforcer, the policy enforcer would either load all protected paths from the server or just map these paths from the adapter configuration. Users can now decide to load paths on-demand from the server and avoid map these resources in the adapter configuration. Depending on how many protected resources you have this functionality can also improve the time to deploy an application.

Policy enforcer now supports configuring the resource cache

In order to avoid unnecessary hits to the server, the policy enforcer caches the mapping between protected resources and their corresponding paths in your application. Users can now configure the behaviour of the cache or even completely disable it.

Claim Information Points

The policy-enforcer definition on the adapters (keycloak.json) was also updated to support the concept of pushed claims. There you have the concept of a claim-information-point which can be set to push claims from different sources such as the HTTP request or even from an external HTTP service.

Improvements to the Evaluation API

The Evaluation API used to implement policies in Keycloak, especially JavaScript and Drools policies, provides now methods to:

Access information from the current realm such as check for user roles, groups and attributes
Push back arbitrary claims to the resource server in order to provide additional information on how a specific permissions should be enforced

Authorization Services

UMA 2.0

UMA 2.0 is now supported for Authorization Services, including support for users to manage user access through the account management console. There are also other additions and improvements to authorization services.

Pushed Claims

Clients can now push additional claims and have them used by policies when evaluating permissions.

Resource Attributes

It is now possible to define attributes on resources in order to have them used by policies when evaluating permissions.

Themes and Theme Resources

It is now possible to hot-deploy themes to Keycloak through a regular provider deployment. We have also added support for theme resources, which allows adding additional templates and resources without creating a theme. This is useful for custom authenticators that require additional pages to be added to the authentication flow.

We have also added support to override the theme for specific clients. If that is not adequate for your needs, then there is also a new Theme Selector SPI that allows you to implement custom logic to select the theme.

Instagram Identity Provider

We have added support to login with Instagram. Thanks to hguerrero for the contribution.

Search by User ID in Admin Console

To search for a user by id in the admin console you previously had to edit the URL. It is now possible to search directly in the user search field.

Adapters

Spring Boot 2

We now have support for Spring Boot 2.

Fuse 7

We now have support for Fuse 7.

JavaScript - Native Promise Support

The JavaScript adapter now supports native promises. It retains support for the old style promises as well. Both can be used interchangeably.

JavaScript - Cordova Options

It is now possible to pass Cordova-specific options to login and other methods in the JavaScript adapter. Thanks to loorent for the contribution.

Release Notes

Keycloak 24.0.5

Security issue with PAR clients using client_secret_post based authentication

Keycloak 24.0.4

Partial update to user attributes when updating users through the Admin User API is no longer supported

Keycloak 24.0.1

Operator deploys nightly build instead of 24.0.0

Keycloak 24.0.0

Supported user profile and progressive profiling

Breaking changes to the User Profile SPI

Changes to Freemarker templates to render pages based on the user profile and realm

New Freemarker template for the update profile page at first login through a broker

Java adapter deprecation and removal

Jetty adapter removed

New Welcome Page

New Account Console now the default

Keycloak JS

Using exports field in package.json

PKCE enabled by default

Changes to Password Hashing

OAuth/OIDC related improvements

Lightweight access tokens support

OAuth 2.1 support

Scope parameter supported in the refresh token flow

Client policy executor for secure redirect URIs

Client policy executor for enforcing DPoP

Supporting EdDSA

EC Keys supported by JavaKeystore provider

Option to add X509 thumbprint to JWT when using private_key_jwt authentication for identity providers

OAuth Grant Type SPI

CORS improvements

Truststore improvements

Versioned Features

Keycloak CR Truststores

Trust Kubernetes CA

Automatic certificate management for SAML identity providers

Non-blocking health check for load balancers

Keycloak CR Optimized Field

Enhanced reverse proxy settings

Changes to the user representation in both Admin API and Account contexts

Sequential loading of offline sessions and remote sessions

Performing actions on behalf of another already authenticated user is not longer possible

Changes to the email verification flow

Deprecated offline session preloading

Configuration option for offline session lifespan override in memory

Infinispan metrics use labels for cache manager and cache names

User attribute value length extension

Brute Force Protection changes

Authorization Policy

Keycloak CR cache-config-file option

Keycloak CR resources options

Temporary lockout log replaced with event

Updates to cookies

SAML User Attribute Mapper For NameID now suggests only valid NameID formats

Different JVM memory settings when running in a container

GELF log handler has been deprecated

Support for multi-site active-passive deployments

Keycloak 23.0.0

OpenID Connect / OAuth 2.0

FAPI 2 drafts support

DPoP preview support

More flexibility for introspection endpoint

Feature flag for OAuth 2.0 device authorization grant flow

Authentication

Passkeys support

WebAuthn improvements

You are already logged-in

Password policy for specify Maximum authentication time

Deployments

Preview support for multi-site active-passive deployments

Adapters

OpenID Connect WildFly and JBoss EAP

SAML WildFly and JBoss EAP

Server distribution

Load Shedding support

RESTEasy Reactive

User profile

Group scalability

Themes

Localization files for themes default to UTF-8 encoding

Using `exports` field in `package.json`

Required to be instantiated with the `new` operator

New storage: `IS_CLIENT_ROLE` searchable field was deprecated

Support for the standard `Forwarded` header when running behind a reverse proxy

Improvements to `kc.bat` when running Keycloak on Windows