This is an experimental technology
Check the Browser compatibility table carefully before using this in production.
The Credential Management API lets a website store and retrieve user, federated, and public key credentials. These capabilities allow users to sign in without typing passwords, see the federated account they used to sign in to a site, and resume a session without the explicit sign-in flow of an expired session.
Credential management concepts and usage
This API lets websites interact with a user agentβs password system so that websites can deal in a uniform way with site credentials and user agents can provide better assistance with the management of their credentials. For example, user agents have a particularly hard time dealing with federated identity providers or esoteric sign-in mechanisms that use more than just a username and password. To address these problems, the Credential Management API provides ways for a website to store and retrieve different types of credentials. This give users capabilities such as seeing the federated account they used to sign on to a site, or resuming a session without the explicit sign-in flow of an expired session.
This API is restricted to top-level contexts. Calls to get()
and store()
within an <iframe>
element will resolve without effect.
Subdomain-shared credentials
Later version of the spec allow credentials to be retrieved from a different subdomain. For example, a password stored in login.example.com
may be used to log in to www.example.com
. To take advantage of this, a password must be explicitly stored by calling CredentialsContainer.store()
. This is sometimes referred to as public suffix list (PSL) matching; however the spec only recommends using PSL to determine the effective scope of a credential. It does not require it. Hence browsers may vary in their implementation.
Interfaces
Credential
- Provides information about an entity as a prerequisite to a trust decision.
CredentialsContainer
- Exposes methods to request credentials and notify the user agent when interesting events occur such as successful sign in or sign out. This interfaces is accessible from
navigator.credentials
. FederatedCredential
- Provides information about credentials from a federated identity provider, which is an entity that a website trusts to correctly authenticate a user, and which provides an API for that purpose. OpenID Connect is an example of such a framework.
PasswordCredential
- Provides information about a username/password pair.
PublicKeyCredential
- Provides a credential for logging in using an un-phishable and data-breach resistant asymmetric key pair instead of a password.
Specifications
Specification | Status | Comment |
---|---|---|
Credential Management Level 1 | Working Draft | Initial definition. |
Web Authentication: An API for accessing Public Key Credentials Level 1 | Recommendation | Initial definition. |