[Ur] The right way to do federated login in 2015?

Adam Chlipala adamc at csail.mit.edu
Tue Oct 20 08:56:23 EDT 2015


For a long time, I've been bothered by the idea that every person should 
have a separate account with a separate password on every web service 
that he uses.  I'm not the only one who's been bothered, and a variety 
of federated login approaches have been proposed, where one account can 
be used to log into every compliant service, using cryptography to do it 
all without allowing services to impersonate their users to other 
services.  In 2010, OpenID seemed like a winner among the protocols out 
there, so I implemented an Ur/Web library for it.

These days, it seems that OpenID has really failed.  I see options like 
OAuth for, e.g., letting users log into a developer-centric service with 
GitHub credentials.

I'm writing to ask the list: is there one obvious federated login 
protocol that seems to be "winning" today, such that it might be worth 
implementing as an open-source Ur/Web library?  If so, is anyone 
interested in getting involved with building that library?



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