Introduction to Single Sign-on(SSO)

The goal of single sign-on is to provide a secure method of authenticating a user one time within an environment and using that single authentication(for the duration of the session) as a basis for access to other applications, systems and networks. In case of WPS there are two single sign-on realms;
1) the realm from the client to portal and other web applications- With this client can login into one web application/portal once and can access all other web applications that are part of the SSO realm.
2) from the portal to the backend applications: This enables a portal client to log into the portal once and then to access a number of back-end applications through respective portlets without having to authenticat at each of these applications.