bin/kc.[sh|bat] start --proxy-headers forwardedDistributed environments frequently require the use of a reverse proxy. Keycloak offers several options to securely integrate with such environments.
Keycloak will parse the reverse proxy headers based on the proxy-headers option which accepts several values:
By default if the option is not specified, no reverse proxy headers are parsed.
forwarded enables parsing of the Forwarded header as per RFC7239.
xforwarded enables parsing of non-standard X-Forwarded-* headers, such as X-Forwarded-For, X-Forwarded-Proto, X-Forwarded-Host, and X-Forwarded-Port.
If you are using a reverse proxy for anything other than https passthrough and do not set the proxy-headers option, then by default you will see 403 Forbidden responses to requests via the proxy that perform origin checking.
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For example:
bin/kc.[sh|bat] start --proxy-headers forwarded
If either forwarded or xforwarded is selected, make sure your reverse proxy properly sets and overwrites the Forwarded or X-Forwarded-* headers respectively. To set these headers, consult the documentation for your reverse proxy. Misconfiguration will leave Keycloak exposed to security vulnerabilities.
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Take extra precautions to ensure that the client address is properly set by your reverse proxy via the Forwarded or X-Forwarded-For headers.
If this header is incorrectly configured, rogue clients can set this header and trick Keycloak into thinking the client is connected from a different IP address than the actual address. This precaution can be more critical if you do any deny or allow listing of IP addresses.
When using the xforwarded setting, the X-Forwarded-Port takes precedence over any port included in the X-Forwarded-Host.
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| If the TLS connection is terminated at the reverse proxy (edge termination), enabling HTTP through the ‘http-enabled’ setting is required. |
Keycloak assumes it is exposed through the reverse proxy under the same context path as Keycloak is configured for. By default Keycloak is exposed through the root (/), which means it expects to be exposed through the reverse proxy on / as well.
You can use a full URL for the hostname option in these cases, for example using --hostname=https://my.keycloak.org/auth if Keycloak is exposed through the reverse proxy on /auth.
For more details on exposing Keycloak on different hostname or context-path incl. Administration REST API and Console, see Configuring the hostname (v2).
Alternatively you can also change the context path of Keycloak itself to match the context path for the reverse proxy using the http-relative-path option, which will change the context-path of Keycloak itself to match the context path used by the reverse proxy.
Typical cluster deployment consists of the load balancer (reverse proxy) and 2 or more Keycloak servers on private network. For performance purposes, it may be useful if load balancer forwards all requests related to particular browser session to the same Keycloak backend node.
The reason is, that Keycloak is using Infinispan distributed cache under the covers for save data related to current authentication session and user session. The Infinispan distributed caches are configured with limited number of owners. That means that session related data are stored only in some cluster nodes and the other nodes need to lookup the data remotely if they want to access it.
For example if authentication session with ID 123 is saved in the Infinispan cache on node1, and then node2 needs to lookup this session, it needs to send the request to node1 over the network to return the particular session entity.
It is beneficial if particular session entity is always available locally, which can be done with the help of sticky sessions. The workflow in the cluster environment with the public frontend load balancer and two backend Keycloak nodes can be like this:
User sends initial request to see the Keycloak login screen
This request is served by the frontend load balancer, which forwards it to some random node (eg. node1). Strictly said, the node doesn’t need to be random, but can be chosen according to some other criteria (client IP address etc). It all depends on the implementation and configuration of underlying load balancer (reverse proxy).
Keycloak creates authentication session with random ID (eg. 123) and saves it to the Infinispan cache.
Infinispan distributed cache assigns the primary owner of the session based on the hash of session ID. See Infinispan documentation for more details around this. Let’s assume that Infinispan assigned node2 to be the owner of this session.
Keycloak creates the cookie AUTH_SESSION_ID with the format like <session-id>.<owner-node-id> . In our example case, it will be 123.node2 .
Response is returned to the user with the Keycloak login screen and the AUTH_SESSION_ID cookie in the browser
From this point, it is beneficial if load balancer forwards all the next requests to the node2 as this is the node, who is owner of the authentication session with ID 123 and hence Infinispan can lookup this session locally. After authentication is finished, the authentication session is converted to user session, which will be also saved on node2 because it has same ID 123 .
The sticky session is not mandatory for the cluster setup, however it is good for performance for the reasons mentioned above. You need to configure your loadbalancer to stick over the AUTH_SESSION_ID cookie. The appropriate procedure to make this change depends on your loadbalancer.
If your proxy supports session affinity without processing cookies from backend nodes, you should set the spi-sticky-session-encoder-infinispan-should-attach-route option
to false in order to avoid attaching the node to cookies and just rely on the reverse proxy capabilities.
bin/kc.[sh|bat] start --spi-sticky-session-encoder-infinispan-should-attach-route=falseBy default, the spi-sticky-session-encoder-infinispan-should-attach-route option value is true so that the node name is attached to
cookies to indicate to the reverse proxy the node that subsequent requests should be sent to.
When using a reverse proxy, Keycloak only requires certain paths need to be exposed. The following table shows the recommended paths to expose.
| Keycloak Path | Reverse Proxy Path | Exposed | Reason |
|---|---|---|---|
/ |
- |
No |
When exposing all paths, admin paths are exposed unnecessarily. |
/admin/ |
- |
No |
Exposed admin paths lead to an unnecessary attack vector. |
/realms/ |
/realms/ |
Yes |
This path is needed to work correctly, for example, for OIDC endpoints. |
/resources/ |
/resources/ |
Yes |
This path is needed to serve assets correctly. It may be served from a CDN instead of the Keycloak path. |
/robots.txt |
/robots.txt |
Yes |
Search engine rules |
/metrics |
- |
No |
Exposed metrics lead to an unnecessary attack vector. |
/health |
- |
No |
Exposed health checks lead to an unnecessary attack vector. |
We assume you run Keycloak on the root path / on your reverse proxy/gateway’s public API.
If not, prefix the path with your desired one.
To ensure that proxy headers are used only from proxies you trust, set the proxy-trusted-addresses option to a comma separated list of IP addresses (IPv4 or IPv6) or Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) notations.
For example:
bin/kc.[sh|bat] start --proxy-headers forwarded --proxy-trusted-addresses=192.168.0.32,127.0.0.0/8The proxy-protocol-enabled option controls whether the server should use the HA PROXY protocol when serving requests from behind a proxy. When set to true, the remote address returned will be the one from the actual connecting client.
This is useful when running behind a compatible https passthrough proxy because the request headers cannot be manipulated.
For example:
bin/kc.[sh|bat] start --proxy-protocol-enabled trueWhen the proxy is configured as a TLS termination proxy the client certificate information can be forwarded to the server through specific HTTP request headers and then used to authenticate clients. You are able to configure how the server is going to retrieve client certificate information depending on the proxy you are using.
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Client certificate lookup via a proxy header for X.509 authentication is considered security-sensitive. If misconfigured, a forged client certificate header can be used for authentication. Extra precautions need to be taken to ensure that the client certificate information can be trusted when passed via a proxy header.
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The server supports some of the most commons TLS termination proxies such as:
| Proxy | Provider |
|---|---|
Apache HTTP Server |
apache |
HAProxy |
haproxy |
NGINX |
nginx |
To configure how client certificates are retrieved from the requests you need to:
bin/kc.[sh|bat] build --spi-x509cert-lookup-provider=<provider>bin/kc.[sh|bat] start --spi-x509cert-lookup-<provider>-ssl-client-cert=SSL_CLIENT_CERT --spi-x509cert-lookup-<provider>-ssl-cert-chain-prefix=CERT_CHAIN --spi-x509cert-lookup-<provider>-certificate-chain-length=10When configuring the HTTP headers, you need to make sure the values you are using correspond to the name of the headers forwarded by the proxy with the client certificate information.
The available options for configuring a provider are:
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
ssl-client-cert |
The name of the header holding the client certificate |
ssl-cert-chain-prefix |
The prefix of the headers holding additional certificates in the chain and used to retrieve individual
certificates accordingly to the length of the chain. For instance, a value |
certificate-chain-length |
The maximum length of the certificate chain. |
trust-proxy-verification |
Enable trusting NGINX proxy certificate verification, instead of forwarding the certificate to Keycloak and verifying it in Keycloak. |
The NGINX SSL/TLS module does not expose the client certificate chain. Keycloak’s NGINX certificate lookup provider rebuilds it by using the Keycloak truststore.
If you are using this provider, see Configuring trusted certificates for how to configure a Keycloak Truststore.
| Value | |
|---|---|
Available only when hostname:v2 feature is enabled |
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Available only when hostname:v2 feature is enabled |
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(default) |
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