Always a Student is one of Clever's culture tenets: we love to learn, and this blog is where we share what we learn on topics that matter to engineering, from small but critical technical details to how we organize our engineering teams. This blog is cross-published on Medium.
A tool for Identity Federation Security Assertion Markup Language, or SAML, is an open standard for exchanging authentication and authorization data between two parties. It’s a common strategy for single sign-on (SSO), allowing users to sign in once and authenticate with multiple third party applications. Similar to OAuth2.0, SAML promotes data security by preventing direct […]
Adding AuthN to OAuth2.0 OpenID Connect (OIDC) is an authentication protocol that sits on top of the OAuth2.0 protocol. It provides a standardized way for clients to authenticate users and obtain information about their identity. In simple terms, OpenID Connect allows users to log in to different applications using a single set of credentials. It […]
A primer on delegated access OAuth, short for “open authorization”, is a widely used protocol that allows users to grant third-party websites or applications access to their personal information on other websites. It provides a mechanism for secure access delegation across the internet. History Class Prior to the creation of OAuth, sharing of information with […]
Demystifying authentication and authorization When you hear the term Auth, what comes to mind? You probably think of signing into a system with your username and password, and you’re half right. But auth is bigger than that. The bucket term also includes everything you can do in a system once you submit those credentials. Auth […]
Designing and engineering a messaging system that is used by 6.8 million students and half a million teachers in K-12 schools is no easy feat. While the typical threats against online systems from unauthorized and unauthenticated access to sensitive information remain, the school environment compounds privacy challenges as additional entities such as guardians, co-teachers, and […]
What’s it like to be an engineer at Clever? What does success look like for individuals and teams? From engineers with non-traditional backgrounds to engineers with Computer Science degrees, four engineers share their perspectives about their experiences, typical days, and growth while working at Clever.
During my final search for an internship, I had an idea of where I wanted to work: a place with a friendly culture and strong engineering practices – something in between a startup and a big company. To my luck, I interned at Clever – an organization that surpassed those expectations in the span of […]
Why multi-region sessions? Each year leading up to Back to School (our busiest season), Clever’s engineering team invests in our highest traffic systems to make sure we can handle user growth and new traffic patterns. During 2020–2021, SAML auth at Clever grew from <10% of our login related traffic to about 40% of our traffic! For this […]
Emily Hou talks about her transition from an individual contributor to an engineering manager at Clever.
Context At Clever, we rely on nearly two thousand infrastructure secrets like DB access keys, API tokens, and session secret keys to provide our services to students and teachers. Properly securing these secrets so we don’t expose them in our various environments requires thorough engineering efforts. In fact, securing secrets is generally a hard problem […]