Configuration of the Olvid Plugin

The last step is to configure the Olvid Plugin and generate the link Olvid users will use to bind their identity to the Keycloak server. Start by opening the Olvid Management Console by clicking the Management Console link from within the Keycloak console.

Here we describe the minimal steps to allow Olvid users to connect, more details about the various functionalities of the Olvid Management Console will be added in the pages under “Using the Management Console” in the left menu.

1. Realms configuration

  1. Open the Realms Configuration page from the left menu

    This page lets you configure which realm is used for the console administration and which realms are used by Olvid users:

  2. Press the ✏️ Edit button for the olvid realm and
    • move the main switch to Olvid
    • select olvid_cl from the Client dropdown
    • select ES256 from the Key dropdown
    • enter https://server.olvid.io for the Olvid Message Distribution Server (without any trailing /)
    • enter the actual Public Keycloak URL your users need to connect to. This is the public DNS through which your Keycloak server can be reached and could be something like https://keycloak.org.com
    • enter the Keycloak API Key provided by the Olvid team

      Be sure to only use the Keycloak API key on a single server. If you need to deploy multiple Keycloak servers with different Olvid user realms, please request multiple API keys from the Olvid team, otherwise you will run into issues 😅

    • the Revocation Allowed switch should remain off: enabling it will allow Olvid users to overwrite a public key that was already associated to their account on Keycloak. This is convenient when debugging but can be a security risk if a user’s Keycloak credential get compromised.
    • press Save

      As soon as some users have enrolled their Olvid profile on this Keycloak server, changing any of these parameters may require them to completely re-enroll. You should normally never change these settings once everything is working!

  3. Press the ✏️ Edit button for the olvid_admin realm, move the main switch to Admin, and press Save

The Olvid Management Console should now display something similar to this:

2. Test your configuration

The Olvid Management Console is composed of multiple pages:

  • Realms Configuration allows choosing the user and admin realms as in the previous step. You probably won’t need to access it anymore.
  • Global Settings should contain some settings in a future update 😁 For now it allows manually running (with a few seconds delay) some periodic tasks performed by Keycloak.
  • Event Logs gives you a view of all administration events that occurred inside the Olvid Management Console.
  • Access Control Management allows managing users of the olvid_admin realm. These users can log into the Olvid Management Console by going to the /auth/olvid/ url on the server

For each user realm (here, only the olvid realm), you have access to the following pages

  • Settings allows configuring some settings but mostly gives access to the precious Configuration Link needed for Olvid to connect to your Keycloak server.
  • Olvid Users allows manually managing users in this realm.
  • Revocation Log contains the list of users that were revoked using the Olvid Management Console.
  • Olvid Groups lets you create and manage groups and decide which Keycloak groups should be pushed to users as Olvid discussions.
  • Bots must first be enabled on the Settings page and allows enrolling Olvid Bots in Keycloak.
  • External User Licenses allows you to generate license activation links you can distribute to people outside your organisation to grant them access to premium Olvid features.

For now, open the Settings page, this is where you will find the link you should distribute to Olvid users

The Configuration Link url should be similar to:

https://configuration.olvid.io/#eyJzZXJ2ZXIiOiJodHR [….] SyZCI6Im9sdmlkX2NsIn19

Press the Open Link button to open the configuration page which should look something like this:

That’s it, the Olvid plugin is configured and you should be able to authenticate as the test user you created after opening this link inside Olvid or scanning the QR code shown on the page with a mobile device.