this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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Programmer Humor

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And no, I will not tell you what my company app is.

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[–] dgmib 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

It’s called home realm discovery. It’s common in business apps though it’s usually used with email & password logins not username & password logins.

It’s done that way to support federated logins. Larger companies will often used a single sign on solution like Okta or Azure AD. Once the user’s email address is entered it checks the domain against a list of sign on providers for each domain and redirects the user to their company’s federated login if it finds it there instead of prompting for a password.

This has several benefits:

  1. The user doesn’t have mutiple passwords to remember for different apps. Which is know to result in users either reusing passwords or writing down passwords somewhere.

  2. When an employee quits or is terminated the company only needs to disable their account in their company directory and not go into potential dozens of separate web apps to disable accounts.

  3. The software vendor never receives the password, if the vendor’s system is compromised they don’t even have password hashes to leak. (Let alone plain text or reversibly encrypted passwords)

Websites that work that way are (usually) doing it right. If that doesn't work with your password manager, you should (probably) blame the password manager not the website.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I doubt the password manager is blame that there is now two steps to logging in compared to the previous one. The password manager still works, just requires using it twice. An annoyance because it used to be a little bit easier.

Thanks for all the info on home realm discovery. I love to learn new things!

[–] dgmib 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

If a website using home realm discovery adds anything more than one extra press of the enter key or mouse click of an ‘ok’ button, get a better password manager.

If you’re annoyed by that one extra click that’s fair. Click counts matter.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Purely minor rage about an extra click but thanks 🤪😄