Development of a Stateless Centralized Authentication Service with OpenID Connect for Web Application Integration in Higher Education

Abstract

This research aims to develop SSO-Authen, a stateless centralized authentication service applying the OpenID Connect (OIDC) standard to solve fragmented authentication in higher education. The objective is to design a flexible architecture capable of supporting multiple identity providers (Multi-Provider) and integrating with diverse applications (Multi-Client) via JSON Web Tokens (JWT). The research was conducted using the SDLC framework, designing SSO-Authen as an Authentication Gateway featuring an Admin Panel and a Claim Mapping mechanism to standardize user data. Quantitative evaluation was performed by comparing results against the organizational baseline and evaluating structural software complexity metrics through practical integration testing with three distinct application architectures (PHP, WordPress, and React/Node.js). The findings indicate that SSO-Authen reduces development time by an average of 78% and client-side software complexity by over 80% across all metrics, primarily attributed to the standardized Claim Mapping mechanism. Furthermore, a qualitative developer experience assessment (N = 8) revealed that the majority of developers were highly satisfied in all aspects. The results can be implemented as a central Authentication Gateway for the entire organization to centralize identity management, reduce developer overhead, enhance security, and provide an effective Single Sign-On experience.