SSO (Single Sign On) with firebase

Question

I'm trying to figure out what SSO is. It's my understanding that SSO allows you to login once and get access to multiple apps.

So I have my react app where I do have only 1 mode of authentication which is Email and Password Authentication with Firebase - no google/facebook login method. (I receive JWT token on frontend which is stored in my cookie)

I want to integrate https://circle.so/ with my app such that if I login in my app and redirects user via button to https://circle.so/ it shouldn't ask to login again and they have a documentation for it in order to setup custom SSO

which you can check here

I went through the documentation but couldn't understand one thing that in order to implement SSO, do I need to have Google/Facebook sign in method on my app side or does SSO works with Firebase Email and password authentication method too ?

Answer 1

Single Sign On is a concept that you log into a single authentication provider, and have multiple apps connect to that provider. Mostly you see this in enterprises (companies) where they have an authentication system such as Microsoft/Azure ActiveDirectory or Okta, they maintain their users/roles/permissions in that single system, and then configure all of the apps they deploy to their users to leverage Single Sign On against that authentication system.

The major benefit of this approach is centralization of user and app administration. They can disable a user in one place, and it disables that user from having access to all SSO-enabled apps.

Apps built with Firebase, leveraging Firebase Authentication, can participate in an SSO configuration. You would configure your Firebase Authentication to do SSO typically via SAML.

Here's an article (a bit older, but still relevant) that describes such a setup.