October 2022 Summaries

FusionAuth, a developer-focused authentication platform, has announced the integration of passkeys into its suite of authentication features, allowing developers to implement biometric login options like fingerprint and facial recognition without additional apps. This enhancement is powered by WebAuthn, a W3C and FIDO Alliance standard for passwordless logins, which simplifies the integration process and offers a solution to the complexity barrier many developers face. FusionAuth aims to empower developers by providing tools, including APIs and extensive documentation, to easily add modern authentication features to their applications. Passkeys will be generally available to FusionAuth Essentials and Enterprise plan developers in November 2022, reflecting the platform's commitment to offering secure, flexible, and developer-friendly solutions for identity and access management.

Dylan Dechant, Director of Engineering at Illustrative Mathematics, discusses how the non-profit organization utilizes FusionAuth to manage authentication for its K-12 math curriculum content, ensuring teacher-specific materials remain secure. The organization, which aims to make mathematics enjoyable and accessible, especially values FusionAuth for its cost-effectiveness, as it offers a solution at about half the price of alternatives like Auth0. While the U.S. is the primary consumer of their materials, Illustrative Mathematics strategically avoids storing student data to navigate privacy concerns. Dechant highlights that the integration involves custom work, particularly in reporting and user experience, and suggests improvements for FusionAuth's ruby SDK and admin features. The organization relies on FusionAuth Cloud's high availability plan for its operations, and the engineering team focuses on supporting content writers and ensuring the content is accessible, whether through digital platforms or print materials.

The tutorial explains how to set up a basic Ruby on Rails application to securely authenticate with an OAuth2 server using the authorization code grant. It uses FusionAuth, a customer identity and access management platform, as the authentication provider. The tutorial covers setting up FusionAuth, creating a new application, registering a user, and implementing the OAuth flow in the Rails application. The implementation includes handling the login process, exchanging the authorization code for an access token, and verifying the claims on the received access token. The tutorial concludes with polishing up the Rails session and provides suggestions for next steps, such as adding user roles and customizing the FusionAuth login page.

Azure AD B2C is a serverless CIAM (Customer Identity and Access Management) offering from Microsoft Azure that provides authentication and authorization for users. It has limitations such as inflexible user interface, high SMS pricing, and inability to backup or export user data like password hashes, which may lead customers to consider migrating to another solution. The decision to migrate depends on the specific needs of the organization, with bulk migration being a more complex operation requiring users to reset their passwords, while slow migration allows users to continue logging in without resetting their passwords. Both approaches have pros and cons, with bulk migration providing a single source of truth for customer data but requiring engineering effort, and slow migration having less impact on users but taking longer and potentially affecting systems and employees.

Cross-platform gaming accounts enable users to play games on different platforms while syncing their progress across consoles or platform switches, offering a larger market for game developers and increasing demand from gamers. This technology has made cross-play possible, allowing friends to play together regardless of the hardware used, and has become more common due to advancements in technology and shifts in the gaming community. Cross-platform accounts store user data and authenticate them, providing several advantages such as wider range of users, cross-platform play, and faster delivery, making it easier for game developers to increase their market reach without needing to buy multiple consoles.