Abstract: A method, apparatus, and computer program product are provided for using single sign-on (SSO) processes to manage security credentials in a provisioning management system. Service access operations are provided that embed credential operations and matching algorithms. Credential operations are treated at different levels of abstraction and define separate services to deal with authentication and authorization aspects. This is performed in order to be able to plug-in an external credential repository, which may be authentication/authorization provided by a third party entity.