The Oxford username and Single Sign-On (Webauth)

2. Single Sign-On, Webauth, and Nexus - what does it all mean?

Despite the many names you might hear being used, things are really quite simple. Your Oxford username and password can be used to login to Webauth – this will start a Single Sign-On session to avoid you having to re-enter your details. The same Oxford username and password are used to login to Nexus (over the web or using a desktop client).

Webauth underlies Single Sign-On for web-based services, and you will only find the official Webauth service under the address https://webauth.ox.ac.uk/. Webauth looks like this:

Webauth also provides options to change your password, reset an expired password, and recover a forgotten password.

With the exception of the Nexus web interface (more on this below), Webauth is the only web page where you should enter your Oxford username and password. You can think of Webauth as a central authentication system that is trusted by various services in Oxford to handle all the username and password checking so that each individual service doesn't need to do it for itself. It is highly secure and very convenient as you only need to enter your username and password once in order to visit multiple independent web services. To end your Single Sign-On session ("logout") you will need to close your web browser (that includes quitting all running copies of your web browser.

The exception mentioned earlier is the Outlook Web Access (OWA) part of the Nexus service at https://nexus.ox.ac.uk/owa. This page will prompt you for your Oxford username and password on a Nexus login screen rather than the Webauth login screen. The Nexus login screen looks like this:

Your username and password are the same ones that you use for Webauth.

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