Information Technology Services (ITS) is pleased to announce the availability of a new service, Shibboleth, an open-source authentication tool designed to offer end users a single sign-on across organizational boundaries.
Shibboleth, which is based on the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) standard, works on the principle of federated identity. Information about users at one organization can be shared within the federation: a group of institutions with an agreement to authenticate one another’s members.
The University of Texas at Austin belongs to the UT System Identity Management Federation. It’s thanks to this membership that developers who integrate their applications with Shibboleth can open up resources to students, faculty and staff, not just here at the university, but at any institution within The University of Texas System.
“Shibboleth allows sites to make authorization decisions while integrating with our existing enterprise directory (TED)” said Enrique Arce, the Senior Software Engineer in charge of the university’s Shibboleth project. “Providing a single sign-on helps to reduce the need to remember multiple sets of account details, and Shibboleth lets us provide this while maintaining both security and privacy”.
Shibboleth is already in use by a number of groups on-campus, including the University Texas Digital Libraries, the Texas Advanced Computing Center, and the Cockrell School of of Engineering where it provides authentication for the Atlas System.
