Shibboleth For AuthZ

// June 27th, 2006 // Technology Bits

I had the opportunity to spend a fair amount of time discussing Shibboleth with Vishal Goenka and Josh Horner while I was at Summit 2006 in Orlando. I wanted to know about the support for Shibboleth that was supposed to be coming in a future version of Luminis and a bit about how it will work. During this discussion it became clear to me that Shibboleth’s core ability for attribute release allows applications to get the information they need to make authorization (authZ) decisions.

Until this point I had only though of Shibb as a solution for inter-organizational web-based single-sign on (Federated SSO or WebISO or WebSSO). I knew I could use Shibboleth internally to serve as my WebSSO, but we already have a hugely successful implementation of CAS in our environment. Additionally I haven’t been able to point at a killer application of the federated WebSSO ability. I knew this driver would be coming, but without immediate demand I was luke warm on Shibboleth.

However, the ability to use Shibboleth internally as a central authority for attribute release and in turn a consistent way of doing centralized AuthZ is a gigantically huge win for us. No longer will every homegrown application need to establish it’s own authorization layer with associated interfaces for maintaining that data. Now I have a serious driver for getting Shibboleth in our environment as soon as possible.

So that’s the lead-in to why Ted Wisniewski, Ken Kochien, and I are attending CAMP Shibboleth: Enabling Campus and Federated Single Sign-On.

authentication, authorization, camp_062, federated, federation, josh horner, shibb, shibboleth, single sign on, sso, summit, vishal goenka, webiso, websso

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One Response to “Shibboleth For AuthZ”

No Sheep » CAMP Shibboleth - Wrap Up says:

June 29, 2006 at 8:16 am

[...] 1) Plymouth State is looking at Shibboleth as a way to accomplish centralized authZ. SunGard sold me on this idea months ago when I could only see Shibb as a federated WebISO solution. I was surprised to see that they are clearly marketing this use case as step two in your implementation plan. Number one is of course to get WebSSO implemented. Both of these are suggested before attacking the politics and policy of extending beyond institutional boundaries. It is clear that this is a smaller step base method that has stages of success. I like this a lot. [...]

No Sheep