JISC

This is the report on Middleware Study 1 for the Evaluation of Single Sign-on Technologies in response to the JISC ITT for Shared Services and Middleware.

Project Objectives

There is considerable interest world-wide in creating single sign-on systems for the web. These can be considered to be in two distinct classes. The first class is for intra-institutional use, and which could scale up to a size which could cover an entire country. The best known of these systems are Shibboleth from Internet2 in the USA and PAPI from RedIris, the academic network provider in Spain and, of course, Athens in the UK. The second class of system is one that is designed to work primarily in a single institution. The scope of this study is the second class.

The interest in these systems can be evidenced from the number of systems that have been implemented world wide. Some of these have only been available at a single site but a number of them have already been implemented by a significant number of sites.
To date there has been no attempt to compare and contrast these various systems. This report describes the University of Edinburgh’s project to evaluate these systems.

Report available electronically only. Read the final report below.