This Thursday at 7:00PM, in Dreese Lab room 266, Scott Cantor will be presenting on OSU’s central web-based authentication system, Shibboleth. Many of Ohio State’s web-based applications and services rely on this open source project for authentication of students and employees and to obtain information about those users for personalization or limiting access to authorized users.
Shibboleth is primarily based on an open standard called SAML that allows for authentication of users from multiple organizations to services running at different organizations, a security model called “federated identity”. The key benefit to users is the ability to leverage a password or other credentials shared with a trusted site (such as OSU’s login service) to access a variety of other sites without disclosing one’s password to them.
Scott Cantor, the administrator of the OSU web login environment, and a developer on the Shibboleth project for about 10 years, will discuss the project, the SAML standard and federated identity in general, and their future directions. OSU’s various activities in this area will also be discussed.