---
title: Authenticating with Talk
permalink: /authentication/
class: configuration
toc: true
---

You can integrate Talk with any authentication service to enable single sign-on for users. The steps to do that are:

### Create auth middleware
Create a middleware service that generates a JWT, which is passed as an option to the Talk embed code (see https://github.com/coralproject/talk/blob/master/client/coral-embed/src/index.js#L36) OR embed bridge (see https://github.com/coralproject/talk/blob/master/client/coral-embed/src/index.js#L44).

### Generate a key to sign the JWT
Use https://github.com/coralproject/coralcert to generate a key with which to sign the JWTs and specify the secret as an environment variable (see https://coralproject.github.io/talk/advanced-configuration/#talk_jwt_secret). 

You may also provide configuration for other optional JWT components (see https://coralproject.github.io/talk/advanced-configuration/#).

### Create server plugin to handle auth
Provide an implementation for the tokenUserNotFound hook within a server side plugin (see https://github.com/coralproject/talk/blob/ef49d9a3d2acc4d2fc03b00e0c872dfbc57f005a/docs/_docs/04-04-plugins-server.md#field-tokenusernotfound)