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0 pointsxyzzy1232y ago0 comments

You can easily end up nested flows if e.g, your app uses auth0 and the user is a business user whose company is saml federated to Azure, for example.

You can quickly get to 3 levels if e.g. your app uses auth0, github login is supported and then the user does social login to github etc.

2 or 3 levels of federation is common.

More levels are possible which is bad if you value your sanity but I think (well, hope) rare in practice. The way you get to 4 or 5 levels is if you have organisational dysfunction on top of all this and you are forced to do your logins thru e.g. one or more fed servers owned by a different team in your company (who add even more layers of indirection).

Mostly as a relying party you will be insulated from all the complexity but if you own your oidc server and manage the brokering you will probably have to deal with a lot of edge cases.

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kjuulh2y ago

Yep for normal apps it is rare. The debugging sessions I've been in trying to untangle some of these flows gives me the shivers. Oops someone had a huawei with this specific default browser, that doesn't handle url paths?!?, some android webviews versions not handling redirects properly, android apps not being able to handle redirects in a webview if the app is not active.

These are very app specific, but that is just the amount of complexity that is opened up for in some of these flows. Hopefully webauthn / passkey can help reduce some of these. But I doubt it.

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