Similar to email auth, social login authentication is ideal for users who prefer not to manage API keys or passkeys directly. This makes it particularly well-suited for onboarding users who are comfortable with traditional web2-style accounts but may be unfamiliar with cryptographic keys and credentials. An example implementing social login authentication for an organization can be found in our SDK repo here.

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Roles and responsibilities

  • Turnkey: runs verifiable infrastructure to create credentials and verify OIDC tokens
  • Parent: that’s you! For the rest of this guide we’ll assume you, the reader, are a Turnkey customer. We assume that you have:
    • an existing Turnkey organization (we’ll refer to this organization as “the parent organization”)
    • a web application frontend (we’ll refer to this as just “app” or “web app”)
    • a backend able to sign and POST Turnkey activities (“backend” or “parent backend”)
  • End-User: the end-user is a user of your web app. They have an account with Google.
  • OIDC Provider: a provider able to authenticate your End-Users and provide OIDC tokens as proof. We’ll use Google as an example.

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OAuth Authentication

This section covers the OAuth authentication process, including both login and signup flows, since they are similar and most apps handle them in a unified way.
1

Create API Key

The frontend generates an API keypair before starting the OAuth login flow. This keypair will later become the session keypair once the user is authenticated via Turnkey.
2

Start the OAuth Login Flow

The user begins the login process by clicking “Log in with <OAuth provider>” on the frontend.
3

Initiate OAuth with Nonce

When starting the OAuth request to the provider, the frontend sets the nonce to sha256(publicKey) based on the API public key. This binds the resulting OIDC token to the keypair.
4

User Grants Permission

The OAuth provider prompts the user to grant permission to share their identity. Once approved, the OAuth provider returns an oidcToken to the frontend.
5

Send Credentials to Backend

The frontend sends the oidcToken and API public key to your backend.
6

Get or Create a Turnkey Sub-organization

The backend gets subOrgIds that are associated with that oidcToken. If no sub-organization exists, it creates one using the identity in the token.
7

Create a Session

The backend calls oauth_login with the oidcToken, and API public key. Turnkey validates that the token’s nonce matches sha256(publicKey) and returns a session JWT. The backend sends this JWT to the frontend.
8

You're Now Authenticated

Your frontend now treats the API keypair as the session keypair. It can use the private key to sign requests to Turnkey using the x-stamp header.

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What does Turnkey use from the OIDC tokens to prove identity?

Turnkey parses and validates the following fields from the OIDC token to confirm the user’s identity:
  • issuer (iss) – The OAuth provider that issued the token (e.g., https://accounts.google.com)
  • audience (aud) – The OAuth app’s client ID
  • subject (sub) – The unique identifier for the user in the OAuth provider’s system
Note:
Some OAuth providers (like Google) encourage you to register separate client IDs for each platform (e.g., web, iOS, Android). However, as discussed above, in the Turnkey flow the aud claim from the OIDC token is used as part of how sub-organizations are identified. If a user logs in on one platform using the web client ID, and then later logs in on another platform using a different iOS client ID, the two tokens will have different aud values. Because of this, Turnkey will not consider them the same identity. To ensure users are recognized consistently across platforms, you must use the same OAuth client ID everywhere. In most cases, this means using your web client ID for web, iOS, and Android flows.

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OIDC token verification

All OIDC tokens are verified inside of Turnkey’s secure enclaves. We’ve designed a new secure enclave to fetch TLS content securely and bring non-repudiation on top of TLS content: our TLS fetcher returns a URL and the fetched content, signed by the TLS fetcher’s quorum key. By trusting the TLS fetcher quorum key, other Turnkey enclaves can bring TLS-fetched data into their computation safely. Verifying OIDC token is the first computation which requires this! To verify an OIDC token, other Turnkey enclaves receive the OIDC token as well as:
  • the signed content of the issuer’s OpenId configuration. OpenId configuration must be hosted under /.well-known/openid-configuration for each domain. For Google for example, the issuer configuration is at accounts.google.com/.well-known/openid-configuration. This JSON document contains, among other thing, a jwksUri key. The value for this key is a URL hosting the list of currently-valid OIDC token signers.
  • the signed content of the issuer’s jwksUri (e.g., for Google, the jwksUri is googleapis.com/oauth2/v3/cert). This is a list of public keys against which the secure enclave can verify tokens. Note: these public keys rotate periodically (every ~6hrs), hence it’s not possible to hardcode these public keys in our secure enclave code directly. We have to fetch them dynamically!
With all of that, an enclave can independently verify an OIDC token without making outbound requests. Once the token is parsed and considered authentic, our enclaves match the iss, aud and sub attributes against the registered OAuth providers on the Turnkey sub-organization. We also check exp to make sure the OIDC token is not expired, and the nonce attribute (see next section).

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Nonce restrictions in OIDC tokens

Our OAUTH_LOGIN activity requires 2 parameters minimum:
  • oidcToken: the base64 OIDC token
  • publicKey: the client-side public key generated by the user
In order to prevent OIDC tokens from being used against multiple public keys, our enclaves parse the OIDC token and, as part of the validation logic, enforce that the nonce claim is set to sha256(publicKey). For example, if the public key is 0394e549c71fa99dd5cf752fba623090be314949b74e4cdf7ca72031dd638e281a, our enclaves expect the OIDC token nonce to be 1663bba492a323085b13895634a3618792c4ec6896f3c34ef3c26396df22ef82. This restriction only applies during authentication (OAUTH activity). Registration via CREATE_OAUTH_PROVIDER and CREATE_SUB_ORGANIZATION activities is not affected since these activities do not accept a publicKey and do not return encrypted credentials as a result. If your OAuth provider does not allow you to customize nonce claims, Turnkey also accepts and validates tknonce claims. This is an alternative claim that will be considered. Only one of (nonce, tknonce) needs to be set to sha256(publicKey); not both.

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OAuth vs. OIDC

OAuth2.0 is a separate protocol from OIDC, with distinct goals:
  • “OAuth2.0” is an authorization framework
  • “OIDC” is an authentication framework
We chose to name this feature “OAuth” because of the term familiarity: most Turnkey customers will have to setup an “OAuth” app with Google, and the user experience is often referred to as “OAuth” flows regardless of the protocol underneath.

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Providers

Below, some details and pointers about specific providers we’ve worked with before. If yours isn’t listed below it does not mean it can’t be supported: any OIDC provider should work with Turnkey’s OAuth.

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Google

This provider is extensively tested and supported. We’ve integrated it in our demo wallet (hosted at https://wallet.tx.xyz), along with Apple and Facebook:
OAuth demo wallet
The code is open-source, feel free to check it out for reference. The exact line where the OAuth component is loaded is here: ui/src/screens/LandingScreen.tsx. The main documentation for Google OIDC is available here.

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Apple

Apple integration is also extensively tested and supported, and is integrated into our demo wallet (hosted at https://wallet.tx.xyz). The code provides an example component as well as an example redirect handler. Documentation for Apple OIDC can be found here.

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Facebook

Facebook OIDC requires a manual flow with PFKE (Proof for Key Exchange). This flow requires a few extra steps compared with Apple or Google. Specifically:
  • You will need to generate a code verifier that can either be recalled (e.g. from a database) or reassembled in a later request.
  • You will need to provide a code challenge as a parameter of the OAuth redirect that is either the code verifier itself or the hash of the code verifier.
  • Instead of receiving the OIDC token after the OAuth flow, you will receive an auth code that must be exchanged for an OIDC token in a subsequent request. The code verifier and your app’s ID are also required in this exchange.
In our example demo wallet, we opt to avoid using a database in the authentication process and instead generate our verification code serverside using the hash of a nonce and a secret salt value. The nonce is then passed to and returned from the Facebook API as a state parameter (see the API spec for details). Finally, the server reconstructs the verification code by re-hashing the nonce and the the salt. The full flow is displayed below:
Facebook OAuth flow
Code for the redirect component, OAuth callback, and code exchange are all available in the example wallet repo. If you prefer to use a database such as Redis instead of reassembling the verification code, you can store the verification code and retrieve it in the exchange stage using a lookup key either passed as state or stored in local browser storage.

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Auth0

This provider was tested successfully and offers a wide range of authentication factors and integration. For example, Auth0 can wrap Twitter’s auth or any other “Social Connection”. In the testing process we discovered that Auth0 admins can manage users freely. Be careful about who can and can’t access your Auth0 account: Auth0’s management APIs allow for account merging. Specifically, anyone with a users:update scope token can call this endpoint to arbitrarily link an identity. For example, if a Google-authenticated user (OIDC token sub claim: google-oauth2|118121659617646047510) gets merged into a Twitter-authenticated user (OIDC token sub claim: twitter|47169608), the OIDC token obtained by logging in through Google post-merge will be twitter|47169608. This can be surprising and lead to account takeover if an Auth0 admin is malicious. This is documented in Auth0’s own docs, here.

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AWS Cognito

The main thing to call out is the inability to pass custom nonce claims easily. To pass the hash of the end-user’s public key, use a custom tknonce claim instead.

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Social linking

Social linking is the concept of automatically linking an email address to a Turnkey user by authenticating with a social provider. This allows an end-user to authenticate with the social provider, or a matching email address. Currently, we only allow automatic linking for Google social logins. The cases are as follows:
  1. The end-user authenticates with Google. Their email address is automatically linked to their authentication methods and considered “verified,” allowing them to log in with email OTP or email auth in the future.
  2. The end-user authenticates with a Google email address (e.g., @gmail.com) via email OTP or email auth. If they later authenticate with Google, the Google OIDC provider will automatically be added as a valid login method, provided the email matches.
  3. The end-user has existing non-Google authentication methods (e.g. phone number, passkeys, etc.) and later adds Google OIDC as a login method (via CREATE_OAUTH_PROVIDERS). The email address in the Google account will be automatically marked as “verified” and linked to the existing user.
For more information on how to implement social linking, see the social linking code example.