Passwordless MFA System: SaaS Enhancement

In 2018, Identité, an American seed-funded startup in authentication solutions, turned to PSA for turnkey product development. By 2020, PSA has already completed the PoC delivery, core development, and deployment of the passwordless authentication tool that was called NoPass®. However, many potential clients found on-prem infrastructure difficult to be deployed and maintained that forced them to refuse the installation of the tool.

Increase sales of NoPass through providing its easier installation in the clients’ environments.

Deploy NoPass in clouds to ensure its installation for customers by one tap.

To get the customers out of on-prem services, the PSA team deployed a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) version of NoPass based in the cloud. The principle of using NoPass SaaS is to connect user profiles to the cloud server. In their profiles, customers can create their campaigns, workspaces, connect services, and so on, making it easy to use. This approach syncs user accounts in one place, allowing administrators to see all the user accounts and their history. Thus, we can realize synchronization by excluding backups, restores, and other clouds from this process.

To deploy the SaaS infrastructure, we chose a dedicated cloud server on Amazon Web Services (AWS), and implemented some features, such as:

• Possibility of payment,

• Possibility of purchasing subscriptions,

• Synchronization with other devices. 

To avoid issues while deploying the product in customers’ environment, we developed CI/CD service. By connecting special instances to the region, it became easy to deploy NoPass on both physical and virtual servers without rewriting URLs.  

Before delivering the solution, our team checked: 

• Performance, to ensure thousands of users to be connected simultaneously

• Expansion possibilities to ensure that the tool can be expanded by one tap

• Failsafe nature and high availability 24/7 by implementing two interchangeable instances that ensured smooth operating

To save time on regression testing of NoPass SaaS, the PSA team implemented specific automation testing. To test the UX of the whole system, including the website and mobile phones, we used special testing farms that allowed testing of the application on real phones, not emulators. Thus, we tested the whole user process from launching the app on the website to providing all necessary actions on the phone. We provided about 300 automation testing checking authentications, registration processes, and others. 

As a result, our client received an easy to deploy and use cloud authentication tool available by subscription that acts like an identity provider.

• CI and CD setup
• Publishing in clouds
• Functional and acceptance testing
• Automation testing
• Regression testing
• Smoke testing