New Shibboleth Federation to aid authentication switch-over control

Newsline from EDINA
April 2005: Volume 10, Issue 1

EDINA > News > Newsline > Newsline 10.1 > New Shibboleth Federation to aid authentication switch-over control

New Shibboleth Federation to aid authentication switch-over
EDINA has announced the launch of the SDSS Development Federation, which provides an infrastructure that enables institutions to investigate the use of Shibboleth technology for authentication and authorisation. This technology enables a user to access national resources by using local institutional credentials.

Membership of the federation is open to any institution, but is initially intended for use by those participating in the JISC Core Middleware Programme (including development projects and early adopters). The SDSS project (Shibboleth Development and Support Services) is itself funded under this Programme and will be operational for its duration.

The SDSS federation currently contains a number of institutional (origin) members, and a variety of EDINA-hosted and MIMAS-hosted bibliographic (target) resources.

Both MIMAS and EDINA are in the process of converting all their JISC-funded services, so over the next few months many more services will be added to those already available.

Institutions and projects can benefit from membership of the SDSS Development Federation in a number of ways:
SDSS provides technical support for use of the federation which projects are free to call upon.

Participation in an operational federation is a more realistic test of your origin/target configuration than purely in-house testing.

Your project work will be made available to all other federation members without additional infrastructure set-up.

Federation metadata may be used to establish ad hoc groups of targets/servers for projects experimenting with sub-federations.

The availability of MIMAS and EDINA licensed resources demonstrates to institutions the immediate utility of the technology.

To join, please visit the SDSS web site at http://sdss.ac.uk, where full details on membership of the federation are available.