Method of single sign-on for independent web systems based on AJAX

Abstract

Single sign-on (SSO) can unify login management of multiple applications to provide a centralized authentication. Users only need to take the initiative authenticate once to access all applications. Aiming at the problem of the difficulties of session sharing among cross-platform web applications and the complexity of SSO implementation, a light-weighted method of SSO based on AJAX is presented. First, facade design pattern is imposed to build a unified user login interface, which is the main entrance for users to use the services of different web systems. Second, by using asynchronous HTTP processing, authentication requests to different web systems are arranged underlying the login interfaces according to users' identities. Once users push the login submit button, the requests will be sent to the required systems. Then the authentication responses will be sent back independently and asynchronously and users will be forwarded to an operation page according to the authentication results. An extra feature of our method is to achieve flexible and orderly SSO. It is proved the proposed method is a valuable reference of SSO methods.