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OpenID is a widely-used open standard authentication protocol of a user’s digital identity. OpenID makes it easy for users to sign-up with and then access their web accounts. OpenID is so ubiquitous that anyone who’s ever logged into Google, Yahoo, AOL, PayPal, Myspace or Flickr, in fact, has already used an OpenID. Almost all major email providers offer OpenID IdP (Identity Provider) services.
OpenID allows users Single Sign-On (SSO) to OpenID providers but is not itself an SSO server. In contrast to Single Sign-On methods (SSO) which use centralized authentication servers, OpenID is a decentralized standard and isn’t controlled by any single service provider or website. OpenID provides online identity management that permits the use of one username/login and one password for end-users across OpenID-complaint internet sites or providers.
OpenID allows for users to sign-up and create accounts in their preferred OpenID providers and then control from there what information they want to share with other websites that accept OpenIDs. The advantages of this include accelerated, easier sign-up to websites, reduced need remember multiple login credentials, and giving users greater control over how much information they share.
Like SAML and OAuth, OpenID is an identity management (IdM) service and EmpowerID supports all three for easy integration and easy use. While there are overlaps between the three identity technologies, in the most basic of terms OpenID can be described as enabling SSO (Single Sign-On) for users and consumers while SAML enables SSO for enterprise users and OAuth is an API authorization protocol between one application and another.
Beyond being advantageous for users, OpenID was designed to be developer-friendly offering relatively easy implementation, coding that can be as easy as basic HTML, libraries in many languages, and the fact that as an open protocol it is constantly being improved upon.