What is Shibboleth?
Shibboleth is an Internet2 technology for providing secure, private, single sign-on access to federated resources and services. Identity Providers within a Shibboleth-enabled federation provide assertions about user attributes to Service Providers. If the attributes of users requesting services are compatible with policy agreements within the federation, Service Providers release services to those people. Shibboleth uses open source software to authenticate and authorize access to services for institutions that have joined a federation and developed policy agreements regarding access to services. It offers the promise of enabling sharing among schools that have diverse approaches to identity management and varying levels and types of technical infrastructure and expertise. People who request services needn’t keep track of multiple user ids and passwords; authentication is handled by the identity management system on each user’s own campus. Shibboleth offers the added benefit of protect
