IdM Shibboleth

What is Shibboleth?

Shibboleth is an open software system implemented based on federated identity solution, which shares person’s electronic identities and attributes securely among multiple organizations and applications. Service providers, that are typically hosted externally are not required to handle Single Sign On (SSO) , instead this is delegated to the shibboleth identity provider which interacts with the authentication services and retrieves the necessary attributes and pass them electronically to the service providers ..

Why use Shibboleth?

There are numerous benefits for the service providers to federate Identity using Shibboleth: :

  • Increased security as service providers’ applications never store credentials locally.  SSO and attribute release is delegated to the shibboleth as an identity provider.
  • Reduce the password support burden on the service provider side.
  • Sharing the necessary data with the service providers while decreasing risk and increasing regulatory compliance.
  • Enhance experience as users are provided with a unified view of authentication.
  • Standard federation using Security Markup Language (SAML). SAML enables the secure exchange of authentication and authorization information between organizations

The inCommon Federation

Rutgers is a member of the inCommon Federation. This is a group of universities, research organizations, and commercial partners that use Shibboleth.  Like other federations, inCommon members share information about each others’ systems. This makes it easy to set up a service so it can accept users from all inCommon institutions. inCommon is also being used by the Federal government to provide access to government services.

The NJEdge Federation

Rutgers is also  a member of NJEdge, the higher education network for New Jersey. We are helping NJEdge build a federation for institutions in New Jersey. See http://federation.njedge.net for more information

Shibboleth @ Rutgers

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