Account Manager

Overview

Account Manager is the core component of the user account system for Fuchsia.

The Account Manager maintains the set of Fuchsia accounts that are provisioned on the device, launches and configures Authentication Provider components to perform authentication via service providers, and launches and delegates to Account Handler component instances to determine the detailed state and authentication for each account.

Each device that supports Fuchsia accounts will have a single instance of the Account Manager component, started on demand, that implements the discoverable fuchsia.identity.account.AccountManager FIDL protocols and acts as the entry point to the account system. Only a small number of core system components should depend directly on Account Manager, the remaining components should only rely on the least powerful protocol required to perform their role, typically fuchsia.identity.account.Persona or fuchsia.auth.TokenManager.

Key Dependencies

• /identity/bin/account_handler - Account Manager launches a separate instance of the Account Handler component to handle the request for each Fuchsia account
• /identity/lib/account_common - Account Manager uses error and identifier definitions from this crate
• /identity/lib/token_manager - Account Manager uses the AuthProviderConnection struct to lazily launch and maintain connections to components implementing the fuchsia.auth.AuthProvider FIDL protocol
• Auth Providers - Account Manager launches instances of components that implement the fuchsia.auth.AuthProvider FIDL protocol. A single component is launched for each configured AuthProvider, serving all Fuchsia accounts
• Overnet If prototype account transfer is enabled, Overnet is used as the mechanism by which the source and target devices communicate.

Design

AccountManager implements the fuchsia.identity.account.AccountManager FIDL protocol. The crate's main function creates a single instance of this struct and uses it to handle all incoming requests.

AccountManager maintains a single AccountHandlerContext instance and a map from the local identifiers of all accounts on the device to an associated AccountHandlerConnection. These AccountHandlerConnection instances are created lazily upon the first request pertaining to a particular account.

AccountHandlerConnection launches, initializes, and maintains a connection to an instance of the Account Handler component. AccountHandlerConnection launches, initializes, and maintains a connection to an instance of the Account Handler component. Each component instance is launched in a separate environment based on the local account ID.

AccountHandlerContext implements the fuchsia.identity.internal.AccountHandlerContext FIDL protocol, using a map from all configured auth_provider_type strings to an associated AuthProviderConnection.

AccountEventEmitter serves clients implementing the fuchsia.identity.account.AccountListener FIDL protocol.

Prototype Account Transfer

Account Manager also contains a prototype mechanism for provisioning an account that exists on some Fuchsia device onto another Fuchsia device. Account transfer is disabled by default and can be enabled by passing --args="prototype_account_transfer=true" to fx set.

When account transfer is enabled, the main function takes two additional actions:

• Creates a single instance of AccountManagerPeer and uses it to serve connections from Account Managers on other Fuchsia devices through Overnet
• Creates a single instance of AccountTransferControl and uses it to handle account transfer requests

The entry point for triggering an account transfer is the fuchsia.identity.prototype.PrototypeAccountTransferControl FIDL protocol, which Account Manager publishes to its out/debug directory. It is accessible by inspecting Account Manager's output directory via the Hub.

AccountManagerPeer implements the fuchsia.identity.transfer.AccountManagerPeer FIDL protocol, and is responsible for instantiating and initializing an Account Handler for a transferred account on the target device.

AccountTransferControl implements the fuchsia.identity.prototype.PrototypeAccountTransferControl FIDL protocol, and is responsible for connecting to an Account Manager on a remote device and orchestrating the account transfer to it.

Future Work

The Account Manager is not yet fully complete. In particular, local authentication state is not finished.

Currently the set of Auth Providers known to Account Manager is hard coded. In the near future this will move to a config file based configuration that will let different build configurations install different Auth Providers. In the longer term we will support dynamic addition of Auth Providers at runtime.

When component framework V2 is available, the lifecycle of component instances launched by AccountManager is likely to be managed in a different way.