Credential Management API

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 agent’s 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.

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

Browser compatibility

We're converting our compatibility data into a machine-readable JSON format. This compatibility table still uses the old format, because we haven't yet converted the data it contains. Find out how you can help!

[1] Behind the chrome://flags#enable-webauthentication flag. (This only works as a link in Chrome.)