The Ultimate Guide to OIDC providers (or building your own)

OpenID Connect (OIDC) is a widely used protocol that builds on OAuth 2.0 by adding an identity layer. It allows clients to authenticate users through a trusted authorization server and access basic profile information. An OIDC provider manages user authentication and identity verification for client applications using the OpenID Connect protocol. They play a critical role in this process, implementing the OIDC protocol and authenticating users on behalf of connected applications. OIDC providers offer several benefits, including security, simplicity and speed, scalability, and compliance with various privacy laws and security standards. Some leading public OIDC providers include Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, GitHub, Okta, and Amazon Web Services (AWS Cognito). Connecting to an OIDC provider involves setting up a client with the OIDC provider, handling authentication requests, and managing tokens for user sessions. This includes registering your application with an OIDC provider, choosing the appropriate OIDC flow, sending the authentication request, handling the authentication response, validating the ID token, and establishing a user session. Building your own OIDC provider requires understanding the OIDC specification, managing client registrations, adding user authentication, and managing tokens. It is crucial to ensure that tokens are issued with necessary claims based on requested scopes and that they are validated upon receipt in requests.