VA.gov

🎒 the background.

During my tenure at Clarity, I am working within the platform team for the Department of Veterans Affairs to help build VA.gov. I serve as a Frontend Engineer on the Identity team, which is an amalgam of Authentication, Authorization, and Identity Access Management (IAM). We act as gatekeepers for what a user is and what they can access every time they sign in at VA.gov. Because our team is so unique we work on a variety of challenges to build different services, applications, and internal tools for other platform teams and VA.gov users alike.

It is hard to encapsulate all of the tasks and tooling I have worked on during my time with the VA but here an outline of things I worked with my team on.

⚙️ the problems.

Mock users

• Have to search in Github for mock users within a huge Markdown file

• Outdated user information including services and passwords

• No definitive way to see if the account is being used

• No way to view accounts without being on VA.gov’s network

Signing in

• Dependent on 2nd-party teams for SAML integration

• User sign in flow takes too long (27 redirects)

• The sign in modal user flow causes cognitive overload

Integrations

• No integration with VA’s flagship mobile application

• Secondary partners like eBenefits and My HealtheVet have different sign in flows

✅ the results.

Creation of a dashboard to manage mock user credentials colloquially known as the Test User Dashboard

• Creation of automated tasks that transform Markdown to SQL (Postgres)

• Creates the ability to sort, filter, and search for test users credentials across environments domain

• Setup authentication using OAuth and Github repo groups for access management without requiring them to be on the VA.gov internal network

Creation of an in-house Sign in Service authentication microservices framework

• Integration of OAuth 2.0 with PKCE on VA.gov with access and refresh tokens

• Implement secure session management with active refreshes

• No impact to original SAML’s Single Sign-On capability

Improve VA.gov for every user

• Increase speed of user flow by decreasing redirects from 27 down to 7 using OAuth

• Decrease cognitive overload by applying user research data in the redesign of sign in applications (modal and page)

• Creation of a flexible, configuration-based authentication for secondary partners that allows the usage of SAML or OAuth

the prototypes