Single Sign-On (SSO) Explained

When you’re developing a product for the masses, it is very rare that you would come up with a totally standalone product that does not interact with any other service. When you use a third-party service, user authentication is a relatively difficult task, as different applications have different mechanisms in place to authenticate users. One way to solve this issue is through Single Sign On, or SSO.

Single Sign On (SSO) is a process that permits a user to access multiple services after going through user authentication (i.e. logging in) only once. This involves authentication into all services the user has given permission to, after logging into a primary service. Among other benefits, SSO avoids the monotonous task of confirming identity over and over again through passwords or other authentication systems.

Let’s look at SSO in more detail and we’ll use a very well-known service to demonstrate its uses and benefits.

The Authentication Process

The basic process of SSO is as follows:

• The first step is logging into the main service (Facebook or Google, for instance).
• When you visit a new service, it redirects you to the original (or parent) service to check if you are logged in at that one.
• An OTP (One-time password) token is returned.
• The OTP token is then verified by the new service from the parent’s servers, and only after successful verification is the user granted entry.

Although making the API for SSO is a tedious task, especially in handling security, implementation is a relatively easier task!

A good example of the use of SSO is in Google’s services. You need only be signed in to one primary Google account to access different services like YouTube, Gmail, Google+, Google Analytics, and more.

SSO for Your Own Products

When you are building your own product, you would need to ensure that all its components use the same authentication. This is easy to do when all of your services are confined to your own code base. However, with popular services like Disqus commenting system and Freshdesk for customer relationship management, it is a good idea to use those instead of creating your own from scratch.

But a problem arises with the use of such third party services. As their code is hosted on their respective servers, the user needs to login explicitly on their services even if they are logged into your website. The solution, as mentioned, is the implementation of SSO.

Ideally, you are provided a pair of keys – public and private. You generate a token for a logged in user and send it to the service along with your public key for verification. Upon verification, the user is automatically logged into the service. To understand this better, let’s use a real example.

The Disqus SSO

Disqus is a popular comment hosting service for websites, which provides a load of features like social network integration, moderation tools, analytics, and even the ability to export comments. It started out as a YCombinator startup and has grown into one of the most popular websites in the world!

As the Disqus comment system is embedded into your pages, it is important that the user doesn’t need to login for a second time within Disqus if he or she is already logged in on your website. Disqus has an API with extensive documentation on how to integrate SSO.

You first generate a key called the remote_auth_s3 for a logged in user using your private and public Disqus API keys. You are provided the public and private keys when you register SSO as a free add-on within Disqus.

You pass the user’s information (id, username, and email) to Disqus for authentication as JSON. You generate a message which you need to use while rendering the Disqus system on your page. To understand it better, let us have a look at an example written in Python.

The code examples in a few popular languages like PHP, Ruby, and Python are provided by Disqus on Github.

Generating the Message

Sample Python code (found on GitHub to sign in a user on your website is as follows.

import base64
import hashlib
import hmac
import simplejson
import time

DISQUS_SECRET_KEY = '123456'
DISQUS_PUBLIC_KEY = 'abcdef'

def get_disqus_sso(user):
    # create a JSON packet of our data attributes
    data = simplejson.dumps({
        'id': user['id'],
        'username': user['username'],
        'email': user['email'],
    })
    # encode the data to base64
    message = base64.b64encode(data)
    # generate a timestamp for signing the message
    timestamp = int(time.time())
    # generate our hmac signature
    sig = hmac.HMAC(DISQUS_SECRET_KEY, '%s %s' % (message, timestamp), hashlib.sha1).hexdigest()

# return a script tag to insert the sso message
    return """<script type="text/javascript">
    var disqus_config = function() {
        this.page.remote_auth_s3 = "%(message)s %(sig)s %(timestamp)s";
        this.page.api_key = "%(pub_key)s";
    }
    </script>""" % dict(
        message=message,
        timestamp=timestamp,
        sig=sig,
        pub_key=DISQUS_PUBLIC_KEY,
    )

Initializing Disqus Comments

You then send this generated token, along with your public key to Disqus in a JavaScript request. If the authentication is verified, the generated comment system has the user already logged in. If you have any trouble, you can ask for assistance in the DIsqus Developers Google Group.

We can see the implementation of SSO on The Blog Bowl, which is a directory of blogs developed in Python/Django. If you are logged into the website, you should be logged in when the Disqus comment system is rendered. In this example, the person object stores the id (which is unique for each person on the site), email, and pen_name. The message is generated as shown below.

sso = get_disqus_sso({ 
    'id': person.id, 
    'email': person.user.email, 
    'username': person.pen_name 
})

On the front end, you just print this variable to execute the script. For a live demo, you can visit this post on the Blog Bowl and check the comments rendered at the bottom. Naturally, you would not be logged in.

Next, sign into the Blog Bowl, visit the same post again (you need to sign in to view the effect). Notice that you are logged in to the comment system below.

Another interesting feature that the Blog Bowl provides is anonymity while posting content (like this post). Think of a situation when you would want a user to post replies to comments on Disqus as an anonymous user (like on Quora). We took the easy way out and appended a large number to the id. To associate a unique email for the user (so that it doesn’t appear along with other comments by the user), we generate a unique email too. This keeps your anonymous comments together, but does not combine it with your original profile or anonymous comments by other users.

And here is the code:

sso = get_disqus_sso({ 
    'id': 1000000 + person.id, 
    'email': str(person.id) + '-' + str(post.id) + 'anon@theblogbowl.in', 
    'username': 'Anonymous' 
})

Conclusion

Although the SSO processes for different services vary slightly, the basic idea behind them is the same – generate a token and validate it! I hope this post has helped you gain an insight into how applications integrate SSO and maybe this will help you implement SSO yourself.

If you have any corrections, questions, or have your own experiences to share with SSO, feel free to comment.

Frequently Asked Questions about Single Sign-On (SSO)