[{"_1":2,"_67":-5,"_68":-5},"loaderData",{"_3":4,"_37":38,"_65":-5,"_66":-5},"root",{"_5":-5,"_6":-5,"_7":8,"_22":-5,"_23":24,"_25":26,"_29":30,"_35":36},"user","shoppingCartId","shoppingCart",{"_9":10,"_11":12,"_13":14,"_15":16,"_17":18,"_19":20,"_21":14},"id","no-cart","count",0,"free",true,"updatedAt","2026-02-04T16:30:49.936Z","paymentGateway","STRIPE","cartItems",[],"loading","toast","locale","en","constants",{"_27":28},"paypalClientId","AX53Cwz8jR6rVVzzZiZNWWXl0dGagi-GZrjG-S3Ua14E5nrKMn7DxDQ730O4R8LusLPp49ALn6aRVaEy","publishers",{"_31":32,"_33":34},"companies",[],"universities",[],"needsLocaleCookieSync",false,"routes/_store+/_readers+/email_author.$slug/route",{"_39":40,"_64":-5},"book",{"_9":41,"_42":43,"_44":45,"_46":47,"_48":49,"_50":51},"Z2lkOi8vbGVhbnB1Yi9TdG9yZTo6Qm9va1Byb2R1Y3QvNzU1MjU","title","Building Identity Systems That Don’t Break","state","published","contactAuthorMethod","email","aboutText","

Single Sign-On looks easy—until it isn’t.

Most teams can make a login screen work. Many can integrate an IdP. Very few truly understand what happens after authentication: how identity is brokered, how users are provisioned safely, how sessions and logout propagate across systems, and why production identity failures are so difficult to diagnose.

This book is written for engineers and architects who want to build identity systems that don’t break.

What This Book Is Really About

This is not another “how to configure SSO” guide.

This book is about enterprise identity brokering—the discipline of placing a trusted intermediary between applications and external identity providers, and using that broker to control authentication, authorization, provisioning, lifecycle, and auditability without hard-coding identity logic into every app.

Using Spring Boot, Spring Security, Keycloak, and Okta (SAML 2.0), you will learn how real-world identity systems behave under load, during failures, and across organizational boundaries.

You will see identity as a system of protocols, state, trust, and lifecycle—not just login screens and tokens.

Why This Book Exists

There are excellent books on Spring Security.

There are excellent books on Keycloak.
There is extensive documentation for Okta.

But production systems do not use these tools in isolation.

In real enterprises:

Identity is federated across companies
Users are created dynamically
Attributes arrive late—or incorrectly
Logout is unreliable
Audit trails matter
Compliance teams ask uncomfortable questions
And failures surface months after go-live

This book fills the gap between documentation and production reality.

What You Will Learn

By the end of this book, you will be able to:

Design an identity brokered architecture instead of coupling apps directly to IdPs
Run Keycloak as a standalone enterprise Identity Provider
Build a local user directory with Spring Boot and MySQL
Integrate Spring Security applications using Keycloak-native authentication
Federate external identity using Okta SAML 2.0
Configure SAML attribute statements correctly for enterprise use
Implement Just-In-Time (JIT) user provisioning
Write Keycloak First Broker Login and Post Login authenticators
Trace full login and logout flows at the HTTP, cookie, and session level
Understand why logout breaks—and how to design around it
Diagnose identity failures using protocol-level thinking, not guesswork

How This Book Is Different

This book is:

Protocol-first, not UI-first
Failure-aware, not happy-path only
Production-oriented, not demo-driven
Architectural, not checkbox-based

You will see:

Real HTTP call sequences
Cookie and session behavior explained
SAML requests and responses dissected
Identity flows visualized with diagrams
Common enterprise failure modes called out explicitly

Every chapter builds mental models—not just configurations.

Who This Book Is For

This book is ideal for:

Senior Software Engineers
Enterprise & Solution Architects
Identity & Access Management (IAM) practitioners
Platform and Security Engineers
Tech Leads responsible for SSO in production
Architects migrating legacy authentication systems
Anyone who has ever said:
“SSO works… except sometimes.”

If you have ever debugged a broken login at 2 a.m., this book was written for you.

What You Will Walk Away With

You will not just know how to configure identity.

You will understand:

Why identity systems fail
Where to place responsibility
How to reason about trust
How to design for change

And most importantly—you will be able to explain identity systems clearly to engineers, auditors, and leadership alike.

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