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Dex is an identity service that uses OpenID Connect to drive authentication for other apps.

Dex acts as a portal to other identity providers through "connectors." This lets dex defer authentication to LDAP servers, SAML providers, or established identity providers like GitHub, Google, and Active Directory. Clients write their authentication logic once to talk to dex, then dex handles the protocols for a given backend. ID Tokens

ID Tokens are an OAuth2 extension introduced by OpenID Connect and dex's primary feature. ID Tokens are JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) signed by dex and returned as part of the OAuth2 response that attest to the end user's identity. An example JWT might look like:

ID Tokens contains standard claims assert which client app logged the user in, when the token expires, and the identity of the user.

Because these tokens are signed by dex and contain standard-based claims other services can consume them as service-to-service credentials. Systems that can already consume OpenID Connect ID Tokens issued by dex include:

Kubernetes
AWS STS

For details on how to request or validate an ID Token, see "Writing apps that use dex".