Accounts & SSO
| Accounts & SSO | |
|---|---|
 Accounts & SSO as used by Ubuntu | |
| Original author | Nokia |
| Developers | Intel, Canonical Ltd, KDE |
| Release | November 16, 2009 |
| Stable release | Varying
|
| Written in | C (glib), C++ (Qt) |
| Operating system | Unix-like |
| Available in | Multilingual |
| Type | Single sign-on framework |
| License | GNU LGPL 2.1 |
| Website | accounts-sso |
Accounts & SSO, accounts-sso, or lately gSSO is a single sign-on framework for computers.
Originating as part of Maemo 5 Accounts-SSO is free software licensed under LGPL 2.1. Accounts-SSO was deployed as a standard component of Nokia N900, Nokia N9, Tizen, and Ubuntu. Later it was integrated in KDE Plasma Workspaces.
History
Accounts-SSO was originally developed by Nokia who eventually shipped it as part of Maemo 5 on November 16, 2009.
It was later integrated into MeeGo 1.2 Handset software platform which was formally released on May 18, 2011.
After the MeeGo project ended, Accounts-SSO was transferred into an independent project by Intel. Canonical Ltd then adopted Accounts-SSO for Ubuntu 12.10 (later also Ubuntu Touch) and KDE integrated it in November 2012.
Features
Among Accounts-SSO's features are a plugin-based architecture, working with diverse user interfaces, storage back-ends, and varying levels of security.
While Accounts-SSO is primarily being used for centralized login management to social networking services, e.g. sharing photos to a service from an image managing application and chatting on the same service from an instant messenger, its plugin-based architecture also allows for local usage, such as disk encryption for which a cryptsetup plugin for Accounts-SSO was developed.
The Accounts-SSO framework consists of several individually released components:
- signond: A daemon providing the SSO service over D-Bus – originally Qt-based, it's being rewritten by Intel using only GLib.
- libaccounts-glib: GLib-based client library for managing the accounts database.
- libaccounts-qt: Client library for managing the accounts database for Qt-based applications – implemented as wrapper around libaccounts-glib.
- libsignon-glib: GLib-based client library for applications handling account authentication through the signond Single Sign-On service.
- signon plugins: A handful of signond authentication plugins are developed within the Accounts-SSO project. Among them plugins for Digest access, OAuth, SASL, and X.509.
- account plugins: The Accounts-SSO project leaves development of plugins for specific services to 3rd parties. Open source plugins for various services (Facebook, Google, Twitter,...) are being developed[when?] by Canonical.
