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Clients

Before a service can use Alias a client needs to be registered for it. A client represents the service to Alias and users. It includes a range of details that help the service interact with Alias securely, and provides information to the user about the service.

Once you have an Alias developer account, you can create a client in the "Clients" section of the Alias UI.

Confidential Clients

Confidential clients are issued with a client secret that allows them to authenticate with Alias. The client ID and client secret are together referred to as client credentials.

Most services should use a confidential client.

Warning

Client credentials allow acting as a client, so must always be kept secure. Do not use them from a frontend, or any other unsecured context.

Public Clients

Public clients do not have client secrets, so can't authenticate with Alias. As they don't have credentials to keep secure, they can be used directly from a frontend, but at the cost of being limited to "online" access - i.e. they can only use granted permissions when a user is logged in.

A public client can't:

The only practical use case for public clients is to authenticate users directly from a frontend. If a service needs to contact users, it almost always needs a confidential client.