The Persona system in July 2011 with the goal of eliminating the need of creating and managing individual usernames and passwords for different websites.

authenticates users against websites that support the system by using only their existent email addresses.

Users need to first create an account on Mozilla's persona.org website, define a password and add one or more email addresses to their accounts. The ownership of each individual email address is verified by clicking on a link sent to it.

After that, signing into a website that supports Persona authentication is only a two-click process. Users who are not already logged into persona.org will need to input both their email and Persona password during the sign-in process, while users who are already authenticated will only be asked to select which verified email address they want to use.

Persona is conceptually similar to other authentication systems like OpenID that also allow users to authenticate on different websites using verified identities.