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LDAP vs Spring Security: What are the differences?
LDAP: An open source implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. It is a free, open-source implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. Lightweight Directory Access is an application protocol that is used to crosscheck information on the server end; Spring Security: A powerful and highly customizable authentication and access-control framework. It is a framework that focuses on providing both authentication and authorization to Java applications. The real power of Spring Security is found in how easily it can be extended to meet custom requirements.
LDAP and Spring Security belong to "User Management and Authentication" category of the tech stack.
Spring Security is an open source tool with 3.63K GitHub stars and 3.2K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Spring Security's open source repository on GitHub.
I am working on building a platform in my company that will provide a single sign on to all of the internal products to the customer. To do that we need to build an Authorisation server to comply with the OIDC protocol. Earlier we had built the Auth server using the Spring Security OAuth project but since in Spring Security 5.x it is no longer supported we are planning to get over with it as well. Below are the 2 options that I was considering to replace the Spring Auth Server. 1. Keycloak 2. Okta 3. Auth0 Please advise which one to use.
It isn't clear if beside the AuthZ requirement you had others, but given the scenario you described my suggestion would for you to go with Keycloak. First of all because you have already an onpremise IdP and with Keycloak you could maintain that setup (if privacy is a concern). Another important point is configuration and customization: I would assume with Spring OAuth you might have had some custom logic around authentication, this can be easily reconfigured in Keycloak by leveraging SPI (https://www.keycloak.org/docs/latest/server_development/index.html#_auth_spi). Finally AuthZ as a functionality is well developed, based on standard protocols and extensible on Keycloak (https://www.keycloak.org/docs/latest/authorization_services/)
We have good experience using Keycloak for SSO with OIDC with our Spring Boot based applications. It's free, easy to install and configure, extensible - so I recommend it.
You can also use Keycloak as an Identity Broker, which enables you to handle authentication on many different identity providers of your customers. With this setup, you are able to perform authorization tasks centralized.
Pros of OpenLDAP
Pros of Spring Security
- Easy to use3
- Java integration3
