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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / JULY 7, 2003: VOL. 2 NO. 27
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Breaking News -
Security:
Internet2 Releases
Privacy-Preserving Web Software
Internet2 announced the availability of Shibboleth 1.0, the first
production
version of software implementing a leading online authorization architecture.
Shibboleth, which is standards-based and open source, incorporates active
privacy management while enabling inter-institutional sharing of Web resources
subject to access controls.
Enterprise software, course management software and online information
companies such as Blackboard, EBSCO, JSTOR, SFX, WebAssign and WebCT have
already begun to incorporate Shibboleth technology into their products and
services. Shibboleth has been widely tested with over 20 leading universities
and research institutions participating in pilot deployments. SWITCH, the
Swiss national research and education networking organization has selected
Shibboleth as their official authentication and authorization architecture and
the National Science Digital Library (NSDL), a major educational initiative by
the National Science Foundation, will use Shibboleth to allow access to
customized or restricted content and services.
"Shibboleth has made cross-institutional course management, content
management, portfolio management systems and other home grown applications,
all accessible through integrated and seamless online teaching and learning
environments across the enterprise," said Christopher Etesse, Senior Director
of Technology at Blackboard. "By combining Shibboleth with the open
architecture of the Blackboard Learning System, the academic community has
gained a tremendous solution for the next generation of online education."
"The availability of Shibboleth 1.0 is a major milestone in a long road.
The
Coalition for Networked Information led much of the work articulating the
requirements for a system like Shibboleth some five years ago; designing and
building it has been a major effort that required the best talent from the
higher education community," said Dr. Clifford Lynch, Executive Director for
the Coalition for Networked Information. "We continue to work with Internet2
and the broader community to validate and widely deploy this essential and
badly-needed infrastructure for inter-organizational networked information
applications. One of the first applications will be managing access to content
licensed by research libraries on behalf of their campus communities. User
privacy is a core value of these libraries, and the adoption of Shibboleth in
this area emphasizes the extent to which Shibboleth's design fundamentally
recognizes and honors user privacy."
"We are excited by the increasing momentum and dedication of the
developers,
as demonstrated by the release of Shibboleth 1.0," said David Millman,
Director of Research and Development at Academic Information Systems, Columbia
University and member of the National Science Digital Library (NDSL) Core
Integration Team. "NSDL has long been committed to the Shibboleth technology
because of its scalable, distributed architecture and its privacy protections,
both critical goals of the NSDL itself."
"JSTOR has been looking for a replacement to the current IP authentication
model in the academic community," said David Yakimischak, Chief Technology
Officer for JSTOR, an online resource of scholarly journals. "We see
Shibboleth as the best current alternative, for it provides simplicity,
scalability, extensibility, and the protection of privacy within an open,
standard architecture. Our early prototypes with Shibboleth have been
successful, and we anticipate ever increasing interest and demand from our
participating academic institutions."
Shibboleth emphasizes federated administration and access control based on
attributes rather than identity to provide a scalable and extensible framework
for inter-institutional authorization. The Shibboleth software was developed
under the auspices of the National Science Foundation's Middleware Initiative
(NMI).
Institutions currently involved in the pilot program include: Carnegie
Mellon
University, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Georgetown University,
London School of Economics, New York University, Ohio State University,
Pennsylvania State, University of Colorado, University of Michigan, University
of Texas Health Center at Houston, University of Washington, University of
Wisconsin - Madison, University of California Office of the President,
Blackboard Inc., EBSCO, JSTOR, OCLC, SFX, WebAssign and WebCT.
Shibboleth is an Internet2 project designed to develop architectures,
policy
structures, practical technologies and open source implementations. Shibboleth
1.0 has been tested with the Apache Web server on Red Hat Linux versions 7.2
and 7.3, and on Solaris 2.8, with Microsoft Windows2000 versions for both
Apache and IIS expected to be available soon.
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