Security and Microservices

Content:

Overview
1 - Setup the work environment
2 - Setup Istio
3 - Istio Ingress gateway via HTTPS/TLS
4 - Setup Keycloak
5 - Deploy the microservices to K8s
6 - Strict mTLS
7 - Istio Authorization
8 - Authentication in the Vue.js fronted
9 - Authorization in Quarkus app
Setup locally

Setup the web-application and Microservices locally

To run these optional exercises you need to ensure you have installed the following tools on your local machine and you can run them in your terminal sessions.

Architecture

Here is the local architecture whichs shows the Web-App and the two Microservices Web-API and Articles are running on your local machine in terminal sessions. Keycloak is running on Kubernetes on IBM Cloud.

The gif shows the logon to the example web frontend application. This is the simplified sequence which happens in the background:

  1. When we invoke the web frontend on `http://localhost:8080 we will be routed to login dialog provided by the Keyloak server.
  2. After the successfully Keycloak authentication we will be redirected to the web frontend and the frontend gets an access-token.
  3. The access-token contains the needed information for the authorization at the Java microservice Web-API and the user information.
  4. The web frontend extracts and displays the username.
  5. Then the web fronted uses the access-token to invoke the Web-API Microservice endpoint to get the articles and displays the Articles.

Step 1: Clone the project to your local machine

git clone https://github.com/IBM/cloud-native-starter.git
cd cloud-native-starter/security
ROOT_FOLDER=$(pwd) 

(Optional) Setup Keycloak locally

If you have your Keycloak running on Kubernetes you just skip to setup Web-App.

In this part we will setup Keycloak locally. We will run a local Keycloak Docker container and reuse an existing realm configuration.

The image below shows the relevant elements we will use later.


Step 1: Start Keycloak Docker image local

Open the first terminal session and enter:

docker run -it -e KEYCLOAK_USER=admin -e KEYCLOAK_PASSWORD=admin -p 8282:8080 jboss/keycloak:9.0.2

Step 2: Import the existing realm configuration

  1. Open the Keycloak in a browser select the Administration Console

Use following URL:

http://localhost:8282/

  1. Login to using the URL in your browser with user/admin and password/admin

  2. Select Add realm

  1. Choose for import Select file and open the quarkus-realm.json.

Step 3: Press view all users

You should see following users: admin, alice, jdoe

Step 4: Verify the role mapping

Setup Web-App

Step 1: Configure web-app

Now insert Keycloak URL/auth in main.js.

cd $ROOT_FOLDER/web-app/src
nano main.js

Example:

if (currentHostname.indexOf('localhost') > -1) {
  urls = {
    api: 'http://localhost:8081/',
    login: 'https://YOUR_URL/auth' // insert your http or https://<KeycloakURL>/auth
  }
  store.commit("setAPIAndLogin", urls);
}

Step 2: Run the web-app

Open the second terminal session and start the application on port 8080.

cd $ROOT_FOLDER/web-app
yarn install
yarn serve

Setup Web-Api

Step 1: Configure web-api-secure

Insert your the auth-server-url URL of your Keycloak instance in application.properties file and save the file.

Therefore you use the Keycloak URL you got during the setup of Keycloak on IBM Cloud.

cd $ROOT_FOLDER/web-api-secure/src/main/resources
nano application.properties

Example:

// When running locally, uncomment the next line, add your Keycloak URL, must end on '/auth/realms/quarkus'
quarkus.oidc.auth-server-url=https://YOUR_URL/auth/realms/quarkus

quarkus.oidc.client-id=backend-service
quarkus.oidc.credentials.secret=secret

quarkus.http.port=8081
quarkus.http.cors=true

resteasy.role.based.security=true

Step 2: Run the web-api-secure Microservice

Open a third terminal and start the service on port 8081.

cd $ROOT_FOLDER/web-api-secure
mvn clean package quarkus:dev

Setup Articles microservice

Step 1: Configure articles-secure

Insert your the auth-server-url URL of your Keycloak instance in application.properties file and save the file. Therefore you use the Keycloak URL you got during the setup of Keycloak on IBM Cloud.

cd $ROOT_FOLDER/articles-secure/src/main/resources
nano application.properties

Example:

// When running locally, uncomment the next line, add your Keycloak URL, must end on '/auth/realms/quarkus'
quarkus.oidc.auth-server-url=https://YOUR_URL/auth/realms/quarkus

quarkus.oidc.client-id=backend-service
quarkus.oidc.credentials.secret=secret

quarkus.http.port=8082
quarkus.http.cors=true

resteasy.role.based.security=true

Step 2: Run the articles-secure Microservice

Open a fourth terminal and start the service on port 8081.

cd $ROOT_FOLDER/articles-secure
mvn clean package quarkus:dev

Open the Web-App

Step 1: Open the Web-App in your local browser

Open the following URL in your browser:

http://localhost:8080

Step 2: Log in with the test user: alice, password: alice