About
What is B2X?
// todo: B2X history & diagrams
Learn about B2X: the identity construct everyone knows but is impossible to explain
What is B2X Studio?
B2X Studio is a collection of tools, libraries, docs & experiments implementing B2X-style identity constructs using a variety of platforms. Problems to solve include global home-realm discovery, delegated administration, authorization tiering, among others.
Today, two major platforms offer ‘ecosystem’ federation:
- Microsoft Azure AD (per-environment: Commercial, US Government, China, etc)
Ecosystem federation as in a single federation used to authenticate all users within that ecosystem, e.g., a user who is a member of an organzation that uses Google Workspace or Microsoft Office 365 can use their existing authentication services with Google or Microsoft to authenticate. This model doesn’t require the user, administrator or developer to do anything specific for that user’s realm - the user is simply authenticated with the appropriate identity provider.
Contrast that with ‘local’ federations, where the federation for a realm is point-to-point, e.g., a user from example.com is authenticated by a federation service that only knows about that realm through a bespoke federation for example.com. Systems like ADFS, Okta, etc use this model.
As more software is built & shipped by non-traditional software companies, the ecosystem model becomes even more important for fast, secure, zero-touch onboarding & administration.