What is Single Sign On (SSO) ?

Single Sign On can be defined as a mechanism or a technique that helps you accessing any website without providing credentials all the time and can simply access a site by using this. However, it is still a debatable question whether Single Sign On mechanism is good and secure in all of the scenarios or there also exist some loopholes in this technology.

In this article of mine, we are going to talk about the Single Sign On technique and its various aspects like where you should go for it and where you should avoid it. 

It is really annoying and frustrating when we need to type username and passwords numerous times. Surely, we can use a password manager Like LastPass in Google Chrome for remembering our credentials, but many of us don’t trust password managers even for less important passwords. After all, if a password manager gets hacked, all your passwords are exposed, and this could lead to a major security breach and all our credentials will become public.

So, In order to get rid this problem of entering username and password all the time, Single Sign On technique comes to the rescue. 

SSO is a technology that allows us to log in once and gain access to a connected system of sites/networks, without the need to provide credentials for each of them. One of the best examples of SSO that we tend to see in most of the websites these days is the Login with Facebook option and also the Login with Google Option as we are already having an account on Facebook and as well as we surely having an account with Google as well, so we simply use the credentials of our Facebook and Google Account and then access a particular website, what it does it saves our time for signing up to a new website by entering a unique username and a strong password. This is what SSO does, it saves our time and provides us access to a website very easily.

When we talk about the advantages of SSO, one of the main advantages is as an individual user we don't really need to remember multiple passwords for different sites, as we can simply access most of the sites by using the same credentials. Although this is an advantage but can turn out to be a disadvantage with SSO as well, as we are using the same credentials for multiple sites and if our password gets compromised then multiple sites or systems will get affected.

Now the question is whether to use SSO or not, so sometimes when we visit a particular website we don't see a normal signup or login mechanism there and they simply provide signup or login via Facebook or Google only so in such websites we need to use SSO forcefully. A good website will always offer their own login and signup mechanism along with SSO so that if you don't feel comfortable with SSO you can go for the traditional way of login or signup.

Just keep one thing in mind, If you are dealing with sensitive data like your bank account details or your credit or debit card details within a website, then always go for the traditional way of providing credentials, in these scenarios don't even think of SSO and If you are just visiting a  website for fun and there is no sensitive data there then you can simply use SSO. As you are not keeping any sensitive data there even if your password got compromised it won't bother you much but if you are using SSO in those sites where you keep your sensitive data and once your password got compromised this can result in losing precious information as well as can result in losing money. 

That's it in this article of mine, I hope you guys must have enjoyed reading it and now you guys must be having a clear idea about what Single Sign On is and where to use it and where not to go for it.