Overview

Marathon comes with user authentication and authorization. It handles user accounts, permissions, cookie-based user sessions, and much more.

Discussion

We should choose between developing a general-purpose auth system or a more complex auth system.

General authentication would cover things like:

• Users

• Permissions: Binary (yes/no) flags designating whether a user may perform a certain task.

• Groups: A generic way of applying labels and permissions to more than one user.

• A configurable password hashing system

• Forms and view tools for logging in users, or restricting content

• A pluggable backend system

A more complex system would cover:

• Authentication against third-parties (OAuth, for example)

• Object-level permissions

Planned Features

Briefly, authentication verifies the user, and authorization checks what that particular person is allowed to do. These are some of the very basic features which we are planning to include.

• User model

• Permissions: Binary (true / false)

• Password hashing system

• Password strength checking