Single Sign-On

About

This article discusses the concept of Single Sign-On and how it relates to i4a. It is important to understand that this article will only discuss the concept of a a 3rd party using i4a to provide a single sign-on or authentication mechanism. It does not cover the opposite approach, where i4a would use a 3rd party API to facilitate authentication for a customer. For assistance with that you would need to contact i4a support.

Background

Single sign-on allows you to have a 3rd party use your i4a membership database to authenticate users on a remote system or separate website. There are 2 primary components to this process. Authentication and user session "state".

• Authentication. Put simple, authentication will accept a username/password combination and validate that against your i4a database. If successfull, a packet of details about the user will be returned, allowing a remote process to not only validate a user, but also set various variables on their end such as first/last names, email etc. Performing an authentication will *not* in and of itself actually log a user in on your i4a website, but rather simply performs a check and returns needed information if the user is valid and active.