Newsline from EDINA
July 2004: Volume 9, Issue 2

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Shibboleth: EDINA leads partnership in authentication infrastructure

by Sandy Shaw

The JISC has made a substantial commitment to adopt Shibboleth technology as the principal framework for authentication and authorisation within the JISC Information Environment. In support of this, EDINA is leading a group of partners within the University of Edinburgh to advance this work under the Shibboleth Development and Support Services project (SDSS).

This project is funded by the Core Middleware Technology Development Programme which is supporting a total of 15 projects to develop and explore this technology. SDSS will act in an enabling role for these projects by providing prototype elements of the infrastructure necessary for this national activity. These elements include:

• a national certificate-issuing service for SSL-based secure communication between institutional and national servers;
• a where are you from (WAYF) service required to direct users to the appropriate authentication point;
• development of Shibboleth-enabled target services, by adding this capability to a number of existing live services operated by EDINA
• auditing, monitoring and support for use of the initial Shibboleth infrastructure.

It is intended that these prototype services will eventually be replaced by industry-strength solutions before the end of the project in 2007. Meantime, they will provide a live testbed which will enable interworking between other Core Middleware projects within a service environment.