Keycloak allow/ban plugin

This is a plugin for Keycloak that checks an allow-list and a ban list for users from GitHub.

Configuration

Add the plugin to your keycloak plugins list. The plugin can be obtained via nix build .#packages.default.

The configuration of this plugin is in a directory of text files with the format github-id github-username, allowing # comments.

Specify a Keycloak config file option spi-authenticator-allow-ban-check-authenticator-dbpath pointing to the directory with the configuration. Note that the error if you don't configure this is complete garbage, and is also not printed by default (sorry)! Use kc.sh --verbose start to read your NullPointerException.

There are three notable files in there:

• banned-users.txt: contains a list of GitHub IDs which will be rejected outright on login.

  If you newly ban a user, you have to kill all their sessions across all infrastructure, including existing Keycloak sessions, since bans only apply on login.

• allowed-users.txt: contains a list of GitHub IDs which will be allowed if the allow-list is enabled.

• use-allow-list.txt: if present, the allow-list mechanism is used. Otherwise it is bypassed and all logins are allowed.

The intent of the configuration is that it is synced by a cron job pulling a git repo.

Setup

1. In the GitHub Identity Provider configuration on Keycloak, set up a mapper with type "Attribute Importer", importing the JSON field path "id" as a user profile attribute "githubId".

2. Create an auth flow for post login on the identity provider, containing one element "Allow/Ban check". This is necessary since it bypasses the standard login flow if you log in via the external IdP.

3. In the identity provider, set the Post Login Flow to the flow just created.

4. Add the "Allow/Ban check" action to the main login flow as a Required element at a point after the username is determined.

Notes

We are unsure if Store Tokens is necessary to set; it is not for this plugin, but it might be a good idea to simply have them around.

We don't think there are ways to ban-evade, since this is managed by a user-invisible profile attribute that is permanently glued to all accounts originating from GitHub.

We have tested this on Keycloak 23 and 24.

Test environment!

There is a test environment included with this plugin to avoid testing in prod. Run:

nix run .#

Then in a separate terminal:

sudo socat TCP-LISTEN:443,fork,reuseaddr TCP:127.0.0.1:4043

and add 127.0.0.1 identity.test.lix.systems to /etc/hosts. Dump Firefox DNS cache if necessary (about:networking), and create a GitHub OAuth app.

You can ssh into the machine on port 2022 on localhost as root, with no password.

Then finally go to https://identity.test.lix.systems/superadmin, and log in with admin/Password1.

Attaching a debugger to Keycloak

We are so sorry.

If you are doing this to the VM here, change the last line of the keycloak startup script to this:

DEBUG=true DEBUG_PORT='*:1337' DEBUG_SUSPEND=y kc.sh --verbose start --optimized --debug

To actually make that work, you want to copy the file from systemctl cat keycloak.service to /start-keycloak, then systemctl edit --runtime keycloak, with the contents:

[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=/start-keycloak

Then systemctl restart keycloak. Next create a forward like ssh -L1337:localhost:1337 localvm and attach your Java debugger to port 1337.

Future steps

We might need to do account age stuff, if we get sockpuppet problems.

Note this also: https://keycloak.discourse.group/t/retrieve-identity-provider-github-token/16613

Also, the GitHub IdP mappers get all of this response's info, including account age: https://docs.github.com/en/rest/users/users?apiVersion=2022-11-28#get-the-authenticated-user