Is DLSS generative AI?

Whats the deal with how users sign in to SSO

Ever tried logging into a work app and suddenly you're staring at your company's familiar login page instead? It's like a digital teleportation trick that we all take for granted until it breaks.

Honestly, the best sso is the one you don't even notice. You just type your email into a retail dashboard or a healthcare portal, and boom—the site realizes you belong to a specific org. It kicks you over to your corporate idp (identity provider), you do your face id or whatever, and you're back in the app.

Behind the scenes, it's all about trust. The app doesn't see your password; it just gets a "token" saying you are who you say you are. According to Verizon's 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report, 68% of breaches involve a human element like stolen credentials. sso cuts that risk way down by centralizing where those credentials live.

Building this isn't just "flipping a switch." Developers often struggle with redirect uri mismatches—where the app sends you back to the wrong place—or session timeouts that boot users out right in the middle of a finance report. You also got "token bloat," which is basically when tokens become way too large because there's too many user attributes stuffed in them, causing headers to fail.

Now that we've covered the basics, let's look at how to actually make implementing this stuff less of a headache for your dev team.

Making sso implementation easier for your team

Let's be real, nobody actually enjoys building auth from scratch. It’s one of those things that starts simple but ends up as a massive time-sink that keeps your devs away from actually building your product.

I've seen teams spend months trying to get saml working with just one enterprise client, only to realize the next customer uses a completely different idp setup. It's exhausting.

That’s where a platform like SSOJet — a tool designed to simplify complex identity workflows — comes in to save your sanity. Instead of writing custom logic for every single connection, you just hook into one api.

• Connect to any idp in minutes: Whether your customer is on Okta, Azure AD, or some obscure legacy system, you don't have to care. The platform handles the handshake so you can go back to your actual roadmap.
• Automated Directory Sync: Handling user offboarding is a nightmare. By using scim (System for Cross-domain Identity Management), the idp sends a signal to your app to deactivate the user account immediately when they're removed from the company directory. This solves the "ghost seat" problem where you pay for licenses for people who don't work there anymore.
• MFA without the math: You can drop in multi-factor authentication without writing a million lines of code. It’s basically plug-and-play for security.

Think about a healthcare app trying to sync with a hospital's internal directory. If you do it manually, you're looking at weeks of back-and-forth with their IT department. With a centralized management layer, you just give them a link to a self-service portal. They configure their own metadata, and you're done.

According to a 2023 report by GitLab, about 50% of developers say they spend too much time on maintenance rather than new features. Offloading auth is the easiest way to get that time back.

Since we're talking about saving time, the next big thing is how ai is starting to automate the really annoying parts of security.

How ai integration is changing the login game

Ever feel like your login screen is judging you? Well, with ai getting baked into the auth flow, it actually is—but in a way that's supposed to make our lives easier and way more secure.

The old way of doing sso was pretty binary: you either had the right password or you didn't. Now, we're seeing "Adaptive Authentication." It’s like having a bouncer who recognizes your face but still asks for ID if you show up in a different car or at 3 AM.

• Spotting the weird stuff: If a user logs into a retail portal from New York and then tries a finance app from London ten minutes later, ai flags that "impossible travel" instantly.
• Friction only when it matters: If you're on your office wifi using your usual laptop, the system might skip the mfa prompt entirely.
• Behavioral signals: Some systems even look at how you move your mouse or your typing speed to make sure it’s actually you and not a bot.

A 2023 study by IBM found that organizations using security ai and automation saved nearly $1.76 million compared to those that didn't. Managing who has access to what is a massive headache, especially in healthcare where people change roles constantly.

AI solves this through automated Role Based Access Control (RBAC). When a nurse moves from the ER to Pediatrics in the hospital directory, the ai detects the attribute change and automatically adjusts their permissions in every connected app. No more manual tickets for IT to update.

"The system can actually predict what permissions a new hire needs based on what their teammates use, which is a lifesaver for IT."

Instead of waiting for a ticket, the ai sees a new dev started in the "Payments" team and automatically provisions them in the right gitlab groups.

Now that we've seen the future with ai, let's get into the nitty-gritty technical protocols that actually make these connections possible.

The technical side of enterprise software connections

So, you finally decided to hook up your app to the big leagues. It’s one thing to talk about identity, but actually choosing between saml and oidc is where the rubber meets the road—and usually where the headaches begin.

Honestly, if you're selling to a massive bank or a legacy healthcare system, you’re gonna need SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language). It’s an XML-based protocol used for enterprise identity management. It’s been around forever and it’s the "gold standard" for enterprise. But man, is it clunky to debug when a signature doesn't match.

On the other side, you got OIDC (OpenID Connect). It’s built on top of OAuth 2.0 and uses JSON for its tokens, which most modern devs actually prefer because it doesn't make their eyes bleed like xml does. If you’re building a mobile app or a modern saas, start here.

• SAML is for the "Old Guard": Great for thick clients and internal corporate networks where security policies are rigid as a board.
• OIDC is for the "New School": Better for api-driven apps and native mobile experiences where you need a lightweight token.

The actual setup is usually a game of "exchange the metadata." You give the client your ACS URL (Assertion Consumer Service) and an Entity ID, and they give you a file or a link that tells your app how to talk to their idp.

Remember, the whole point of this is that we don't want the user's password. We just want a secure token from the provider that says "this person is legit." Here is a quick look at how you might handle a basic OIDC callback in a node environment:

// A simple way to handle the redirect back from the provider
app.get('/auth/callback', async (req, res) => {
  try {
    const params = client.callbackParams(req);
    // We are exchanging the code for a token here
    // Like we said at the start, we just want the token, not the password
    const tokenSet = await client.callback('https://yourapp.com/cb', params);
    
<span class="hljs-variable language_">console</span>.<span class="hljs-title function_">log</span>(<span class="hljs-string">&#x27;received claims:&#x27;</span>, tokenSet.<span class="hljs-title function_">claims</span>());
res.<span class="hljs-title function_">redirect</span>(<span class="hljs-string">&#x27;/dashboard&#x27;</span>);
  } catch (err) {
    console.error('auth failed', err);
    res.status(500).send('Something went wrong with the handshake');
  }
});

As noted earlier in the GitLab study, devs are already drowned in maintenance. Don't make them manually manage cert rotations for 50 different clients. Use a centralized tool or at least automate the metadata refresh so you aren't waking up at 2 AM because a client's certificate expired.

At the end of the day, sso is about making things boring. If it's boring, it means it's working. You want your users to just click a button and get to work—without ever knowing the mountain of protocols and ai-driven security checks making it happen behind the curtain.