See our launch blog post for more information!

Please take the SSO Community Survey to let us know how we're doing, and to help us plan our roadmap!

sso — lovingly known as the S.S. Octopus or octoboi — is the authentication and authorization system BuzzFeed developed to provide a secure, single sign-on experience for access to the many internal web apps used by our employees.

It depends on Google as its authoritative OAuth2 provider, and authenticates users against a specific email domain. Further authorization based on Google Group membership can be required on a per-upstream basis.

The main idea behind sso is a "double OAuth2" flow, where sso-auth is the OAuth2 provider for sso-proxy and Google is the OAuth2 provider for sso-auth.

sso is built on top of Bitly’s open source oauth2_proxy

In a nutshell:

• If a user visits an sso-proxy-protected service (foo.sso.example.com) and does not have a session cookie, they are redirected to sso-auth (sso-auth.example.com).
  • If the user does not have a session cookie for sso-auth, they are prompted to log in via the usual Google OAuth2 flow, and then redirected back to sso-proxy where they will now be logged in (to foo.sso.example.com)
  • If the user does have a session cookie for sso-auth (e.g. they have already logged into bar.sso.example.com), they are transparently redirected back to proxy where they will be logged in, without needing to go through the Google OAuth2 flow
• sso-proxy transparently re-validates & refreshes the user's session with sso-auth

• Prebuilt binary releases
• Docker
• go get github.com/buzzfeed/sso/cmd/...

Follow our Quickstart guide to spin up a local deployment of sso to get a feel for how it works!

Help us keep sso open and inclusive. Please read and follow our Code of Conduct.

Contributions to sso are welcome! Please follow our contribution guideline.

Please file any issues you find in our issue tracker.

If you come across any security vulnerabilities with the sso repo or software, please email security@buzzfeed.com. In your email, please request access to our bug bounty program so we can compensate you for any valid issues reported.

sso is actively maintained by the BuzzFeed Infrastructure teams.

• pomerium an identity-access proxy, inspired by BeyondCorp.