SHARED DEVICES, INDIVIDUAL IDENTITIES: SECURE SSO AND SINGLELOGOUT ARCHITECTURE FOR MULTI-USER FRONTLINE MOBILE FLEETS

Frontline operations in retail, healthcare, warehousing, and field service increasingly equip teams with shared
handheld devices rather than individually assigned hardware, driven by cost, device management overhead, and
the practical reality that a given shift role, not a given person, is often what a device is provisioned for. This shared
device model creates an identity and access management problem not well addressed by conventional single sign
on, SSO, architectures, which were designed around the assumption that a device has a single, relatively persistent
user. On a shared frontline device, a dozen or more workers may authenticate and deauthenticate across a single
hardware unit in one day, and any failure to fully terminate the previous worker's session before the next worker
begins theirs constitutes a session leakage event with direct privacy and compliance consequences. This article
examines architecture patterns for secure multi user identity on shared frontline mobile fleets, with particular
attention to single logout, SLO, the often neglected counterpart to single sign on that governs how reliably a
session is torn down. Drawing on established identity protocol standards and security research published through
early 2023, the analysis compares shared PIN, badge or near field communication tap in, device bound passkey,
and biometric fast switch approaches across security, usability, implementation cost, and offline resilience, and
proposes a hybrid design that combines a fast front channel identity switch with a verified back channel logout
propagation step. The article presents comparative security and usability results, analyzes the specific failure
modes that produce session leakage and incomplete logout, and closes with a decision framework and glossary
for architecture and security teams building identity systems for shared device fleets.

single sign on, single logout, shared device identity, frontline mobile fleets, session management, FIDO2, OpenID Connect, zero trust architecture, mobile device management, workforce identity.