I'm explaining it poorly; think about the urls for common authentication redirects and how it usually looks when you go through an SSO portal. Probably you sta

I'm explaining it poorly; think about the urls for common authentication redirects and how it usually looks when you go through an SSO portal. Probably you start at a page like: sso.company.com When you try to access a service, you're taken to probably something like sso.company.com/auth If your company uses Microsoft or Gmail, very likely before you reach your SSO login, it may temporarily flash MS/Google's auth page briefly before redirecting or loading the elements for your company's SSO portal After login, probably it will then load something like: saml_provider.company.com/autheticate/redirect saml_provider.company.com/[some generated string in the url]/some_action_page and depending on how it's configured, you might go through a few of those types of URLs with no direct connection to your company or the resource you want, but it's just the authentication process passing your authentication from service to service until finally it figures out to return you to your originally requested resource and it passes an auth token. † The reason I think this is frustrating is that it's very fast, no user input, but it is observable by the user; you will see the pages loading and the long urls, sometimes some basic info is printed to the page with simple HTML, but the user has no idea what's going on. Combine this with the fact that this is exactly what happens when you accidentally click on a spam site from search results, and my problem is "how can a user possibly know if this redirect spiral is a legitimate authentication process or if they've accidentally clicked on something compromised?" † sometimes these auth-spirals don't even take you to the correct item you were trying to get to in the first place, it takes you to a generic landing page...Reddit is guilty of this from my experience where logging in to subreddits that are flagged NSFW will redirect me to the reddit front page instead of back to the subreddit I initiated the log in to check