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 2009-11-16.

It was later integrated into MeeGo 1.2 Handset software platform which was formally released on 2011-05-18.

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 by Canonical.