Table of Contents

About

Single Sign-On (SSO, trusted sign-on) is the ability:

  • to require a user to sign once
  • and gain access to different applications.

SSO is also known as:

  • as Trusted sign-on
  • or Multi-Domain Security

Characteristics

Flow

Single sign-on (sso) is conceptually pretty simple 1).

If you know the oauth flows, it's basically a indirect oauth flow, where the authorization point sets its own session cookie.

In this flow, there are:

  • The sso server, sso.com
  • and two applications:
    • domain1.com
    • domain2.com

Login on domain1.com

Login on domain1.com

Next, log in on domain2

  • User hits domain2.com and redirects to sso.com
  • sso.com already has a cookie for the user, so does not present the login page
  • sso.com redirects back to domain2.com with the encrypted information
  • domain2.com logs in the user.