Accounts-SSO was originally developed by Nokia who eventually shipped it as part of Maemo 5[2] on November 16, 2009.[8][9]
It was later integrated into MeeGo 1.2 Handset software platform[10][11] which was formally released on May 18, 2011.[12]
After the MeeGo project ended, Accounts-SSO was transferred into an independent project by Intel.[13] Canonical Ltd then adopted Accounts-SSO for Ubuntu 12.10[14] (later also Ubuntu Touch[15]) and KDE integrated it in November 2012.[16]
Features
Among Accounts-SSO's features are a plugin-based architecture, working with diverse user interfaces, storage back-ends, and varying levels of security.[3][13][17]
While Accounts-SSO is primarily being used for centralized login management to social networking services, e.g. sharing photos to a service from an image managing application and chatting on the same service from an instant messenger, its plugin-based architecture also allows for local usage, such as disk encryption for which a cryptsetup plugin for Accounts-SSO was developed.[18]
The Accounts-SSO framework consists of several individually released components:
signond: A daemon providing the SSO service over D-Bus – originally Qt-based, it's being rewritten by Intel using only GLib.[19]
libaccounts-glib: GLib-based client library for managing the accounts database.[20]
libaccounts-qt: Client library for managing the accounts database for Qt-based applications[21] – implemented as wrapper around libaccounts-glib.[3]
libsignon-glib: GLib-based client library for applications handling account authentication through the signond Single Sign-On service.[22]
signon plugins: A handful of signond authentication plugins are developed within the Accounts-SSO project. Among them plugins for Digest access,[23]OAuth,[24]SASL,[25] and X.509.[26]
account plugins: The Accounts-SSO project leaves development of plugins for specific services to 3rd parties. Open source plugins for various services (Facebook, Google, Twitter,...) are being developed[when?] by Canonical.[27]
^Alexander Kanavin (March 15, 2013). "GNOME Online Accounts: why it is the way it is". Retrieved 2013-04-15. […] just a quick note to you all that we (Intel OTC) are rewriting the SSO daemon and authentication plugins in C using glib and gdbus […]