Announced a few days ago, dex is an open source OpenID Connect Identity Provider from the good folks at CoreOS.
CoreOS is a major player in the container space and the originating sponsor of Rkt container runtime.
From the release announcement:
Just about every project requires some sort of authentication and user-management. Applications need a way for users to log-in securely from a variety of platforms such as web, mobile, CLI tools and automated systems. Developers typically use a platform-dependent solution or, just as often, find existing solutions don’t quite address their needs and so they resort to writing their own solution from scratch.
Most developers are not in the security business, however. Having to write their own authentication software is not only an annoying distraction from their core product, but it can be downright dangerous as well. Doing security correctly is tricky, as we’ve seen with the many recent high-profile breaches, and doing it in a vacuum without proper auditing by other engineers and security experts is even more risky.
For these reasons, we have decided to open source dex so that others may benefit from the work we’ve done to make dex a secure and robust platform. Now available to the community, dex in turn will benefit from having more stakeholders. No one will ever have to write their own “Forgot your password?” flow, or “Login with X, Y or Z” feature again.
The project is named ‘dex’ because it is a central index of users that other pieces of software can authenticate against.
Interested developers may visit the project’s page at https://github.com/coreos/dex.
