A Performant and Secure Single Sign-On System Using Microservices

Abstract

The Single Sign-On (SSO) method eases the authentication and authorization process. The solution substantially impacts the users' experience since they only need to authenticate once to access multiple services without re-authenticating. This paper adopts an incremental prototyping approach to develop an SSO system. The research reveals that while SSO improves users' quality of experience, it could imply performance and security issues if traditional architectures are adopted. Thus, a Microservices-based approach with containerization is subsequently proposed to overcome SSO's quality issues in practice. The SSO system is containerized using Docker and managed using Docker Compose. The results show a significant performance and security improvement.