Beamable supports custom authentication federation using managed microservices. You can use this feature to implement an OAuth2, OpenID Connect, or a custom external authentication provider and use it with Beamable. We also support two-way challenge-based flows for PKI-based authentication for Web3/blockchain scenarios.

Some use cases:

• Blockchain wallet authentication - Attach a wallet to a player's account and use it for authentication.
• External authentication provider integration - Already using something like Auth0? Use it for your game to achieve a Single Sign-On experience.

Steps

1. Create a microservice

You should first create a microservice or use an existing one.

NOTE: You can bundle multiple authentication federations in a single microservice using namespaces (more on this below).

2. Implement an IThirdPartyCloudIdentity interface

Create an implementation of IThirdPartyCloudIdentity in Beamable/Common (or any shared assembly).
This will create a "tuna" namespace for your new authentication scheme. Namespace will be a part of the authentication endpoint path. E.g. /your_microservice/tuna/authenticate

public class TunaCloudIdentity : IThirdPartyCloudIdentity
{
    public string UniqueName => "tuna";
}

3. Implement IFederatedLogin in your microservice

Let's say you already have a TunaService that holds all your user's data. We will use it to validate a "token" received by the client and respond with a "user_id".

[Microservice("AuthenticationMicroservice")]
public class AuthenticationMicroservice : IFederatedLogin<TunaCloudIdentity>
{
  public async Promise<FederatedAuthenticationResponse> Authenticate(string token, string challenge, string solution)
  {
    // Token can be something like an authorization_code, depending on your client and service implementations
    var tunaUserResponse = await TunaService.GetUserByAuthorizationCode(token);
    if (tunaUserResponse == null)
    {
        throw new UnauthorizedException();
    }
    return new FederatedAuthenticationResponse { user_id = tunaUserResponse.userId };
  }
}

In this example, we didn't use the "challenge" and "solution" arguments. The standard use case for challenges is wallet authentication. If a client sends us a wallet address as a token, the only way to verify the ownership of that wallet is to issue a challenge, and require a user to sign that challenge using their private key. Solana/Phantom wallet authentication is an example that uses a challenge.

4. Publish your microservice

5. CLIENT: Attach an external identity to a player

var ctx = BeamContext.Default;
var response = await ctx.Accounts
  .AddExternalIdentity<TunaCloudIdentity, AuthenticationMicroserviceClient>(_authorizationCode);

6. CLIENT: Login using an external identity

var ctx = BeamContext.Default;
var accountRecoveryResponse = await ctx.Accounts
  .RecoverAccountWithExternalIdentity<TunaCloudIdentity, AuthenticationMicroserviceClient>(_authorizationCode);
await accountRecoveryResponse.SwitchToAccount();

Beamable provided examples

• Solana/Phantom authentication and inventory federation