Internet2 today announced that it has released Shibboleth 2.0, the latest major version of the most widely-deployed federated authentication implementation. Developed by the Internet2 community and its partners around the world, the latest release greatly enhances several key elements of Shibboleth in an effort to ensure interoperability with other commercial and open-source federated identity solutions; to improve personalization and security; as well as to ease installation, management and operation processes.
The goal is to provide a more robust and interoperable platform that will help catalyze the worldwide growth of higher education and research federations like the InCommon Federation which serves the U.S. higher education sector and provides a framework for participating organizations to collaborate and share resources using Shibboleth technology.
"Shibboleth aims to help our community meet the increasing demand for access to protected online applications and resources as well as to support the growing need for campus-based researchers to use online collaboration tools to support work with peers at other institutions. Shibboleth 2.0 provides an improved platform for exchanging information in a secure and privacy-preserving manner while at the same time reducing the administrative burdens for institutions and their service provider partners," said Ken Klingenstein, Internet2 senior director of middleware and security. "We are grateful for the tremendous collaboration in developing this important new release and look forward to working with the worldwide Shibboleth community to further roll out and refine this technology."
Shibboleth 2.0 adds an open source implementation of the OASIS SAML 2.0 standard to the suite of protocol implementations available in previous releases. The software provides a secure, single-sign on mechanism for institutions to enable their users to access protected online resources within their campuses and from their external service provider partners while at the same time protecting individual user privacy.
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