2018-12-14 21:01 |
Coinbase exchange sets the standards in cryptocurrency exchange industry as well as having prestige that most exchanges honestly lack.
This comes from the company’s will to have the best infrastructure and marketing ideas to outcompete other exchanges. Well, that is what the company showed once again on Thursday with the Single Sign On (SSO) via Consensus mechanism.
In a blog post on Coinbase blog by Kareem Moussa, the Infrastructure team at Coinbase developed the Single Sign On to make it easy and safe for engineers to elevate their own permissions temporarily to perform complex infrastructure changes. Changes on the Coinbase platform are consensual over a quorum of engineers that must follow set mechanisms that implement the consensus.
These engineers are requires to vote and approve the permission, code and configuration changes a user may be willing to implement. The consensus mechanisms allow for clear guidelines and auditable trails of any changes made to the Coinbase system. Furthermore, the security of the user’s funds is enhanced due to the consensus and audit trails.
Hypergrowth at Coinbase has presented many opportunities to tackle new scaling challenges, including onboarding engineers in a quick and secure manner. Read more about the Single Sign On system we built to automate user privilege escalation via consensus. https://t.co/VEaOfotj2k
— Coinbase (@coinbase) December 13, 2018
The company has seen a huge growth in the number of employees in 2018, from 200 to over 600 employees. The company has resulted to automation of the manual provision of accounts as they plan to expand further in future. The past few months have been excellent for Coinbase, from offering egg freezing benefits to their employees, announcing that they will be adding hundreds of cryptocurrencies on the site and now the SSO.
The Single Sign On is an identity provider that is expected to protect the changes made to the code, permissions or configurations through a consensus to change current system of manually provisioning accounts. The automated system will work on having the highest security standards.
To ensure that these standards of the identity provider are met, the system employs a combination of SAML, LDAP, and consensus.
About SAMLThe consensus is enabled through the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) that doubles up as the defector enterprise SSO protocol. Coinbase philosophy is to partner with GitHub and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide production services for its protocol. SAML is used to send cryptographically signed permissions, to these production services which are in turn used to authorize users on Coinbase platform.
About LDAPUsing the SAML identity providers which automates the service provisions requires the LDAP directory service. The service is used to represent organizations structure that secures the native authentication mechanisms for users.
The consensus uses the SAML identity provider to automated services for the engineers changing from the manual provisions. This will enable the Coinbase to build one of the most secure and efficient platform to switch up the cryptocurrency industry.
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