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We're using Keycloak 12 for authentication in our portal and there are two different types of users:

  1. Internal users (read from our internal LDAP)
  2. External users (stored in Keycloak but without being synced with the LDAP)

We'd now like to use the "Forget Password" feature provided by Keycloak. After having configured the feature and the mail server, this works fine out-of-the-box.

However we'd like to restrict the "Forget Password" feature to all users which belong to (2), i.e. the internal users. These users are not allowed updating their password via Keycloak as this is done by another mechanism.

I couldn't find any information in the documentation so far if this is possible at all?

dreamcrash
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Robert Strauch
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1 Answers1

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The Keycloak Forgot Password feature is applied at the Realm level, hence applied to all the users belonging to the Realm. For Keycloak, the LDAP is just an external storage with users to authenticate against. Consequently, out of the box, there is no way (as far as I know) for the Forgot Password to only be enabled to certain users within the Realm.

Even if it would be possible IMO it would not be a very user-friendly feature, since when one activates such a feature a new link will be shown to the users on the login page in case they have forgotten their passwords. So if a user from the LDAP would click on it, it would display an error or something?!

Alternatively, you can configure the LDAP of the so-called internal users in another Realm than the one with the Forgot Password enabled. And then configure the newly created realm to be an external Identity Provider, which the users could explicitly authenticate against it. So in practice, the users would lend in the normal login page, the external users could login normally, and would have the Forgot Password option enabled. The internal users would explicitly click on the external IDP to authenticate themselves. Log in using the external IDP would be a similar user-experience as log in to the normal login page, however, the Forgot Password option would not be shown.

You can see an example such configuration here.

dreamcrash
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