The Credential Management API lets a website store and retrieve password, public key, and federated credentials. These capabilities allow users to sign in without typing passwords, see the federated account they used to sign in to a site, and resume a session without the explicit sign-in flow of an expired session.

This API lets websites interact with a user agent's password system directly so that websites can deal in a uniform way with site credentials and user agents can provide better assistance with the management of their credentials. For example, user agents have a particularly hard time dealing with federated identity providers or esoteric sign-in mechanisms.

To address these problems, the Credential Management API provides ways for a website to store and retrieve different types of credentials. This gives users capabilities such as seeing the federated account they used to sign on to a site, or resuming a session without the explicit sign-in flow of an expired session.

Later versions of the spec allow credentials to be retrieved from a different subdomain. For example, a password stored in login.example.com may be used to log in to www.example.com. To take advantage of this, a password must be explicitly stored by calling CredentialsContainer.store(). This is sometimes referred to as public suffix list (PSL) matching; however the spec only recommends using PSL to determine the effective scope of a credential. It does not require it. Hence browsers may vary in their implementation.

Credential

Provides information about an entity as a prerequisite to a trust decision.

CredentialsContainer

Exposes methods to request credentials and notify the user agent when interesting events occur such as successful sign in or sign out. This interface is accessible from navigator.credentials.

FederatedCredential

Provides information about credentials from a federated identity provider, which is an entity that a website trusts to correctly authenticate a user, and which provides an API for that purpose. OpenID Connect is an example of such a framework.

PasswordCredential

Provides information about a username/password pair.

PublicKeyCredential

Provides a credential for logging in using a more secure system based on asymmetric cryptography instead of a password.