The Overview
In this episode of Identity, Unlocked, principal architect at Auth0 and podcast host Vittorio Bertocci focuses on OpenID foundation’s FastFederation (FastFed) group. Vittorio chats with Darin McAdams, a software engineer at AWS and the author of FastFed’s specifications, to explore how FastFed is looking to shorten the time it takes to join organizations into a federation.
Darin explains that Dick Hardt, one of the founders of FastFed, zeroed in on him to edit and draft the spec for FastFed. Darin began at the beginning, creating a sample G Suite and trying to set up a federation between both AWS and Salesforce. When he finally arrived at a place to begin joining the orgs, he was stuck - the first line, the first page, the needle scratches, and he doesn’t know how to proceed.
Eventually, after reading the SAML specs and following Google’s directions for integration, a long drawn out process of over 40 steps, Darin was finally able to integrate his sample G Suite with AWS, but never Salesforce. It became clear to him this process could be made much faster through automation.
FastFed is going after integrating a push-button single-sign-on experience for users of a federation, and to do so, they have to develop the communication between different authentication programs used by the organizations. FastFed also runs into the complications of communicating between identity providers, enterprise security preferences, and creating trust between the orgs.
Darin and Vittorio dive into more details of the problems faced creating FastFed and scaling down a program with a vast scope into a push-button user experience.
Top comments (0)