Contact:

Greg Wood, Internet2

ghwood@internet2.edu

703-625-3917

OVER 20 UNIVERSITIES AND COMPANIES SUCCESSFULLY TEST PRIVACY-PRESERVING FEDERATED WEB AUTHORIZATION SYSTEM

Demonstrations at Fall 2002 Internet2 Member Meeting highlight pilot deployments of open, standards-based system

Los Angeles, California--October 29, 2002--Early deployment of Shibboleth, an emerging Web authorization architecture and software, by over 20 institutions is proving the possibilities of the open, standards-based federated authorization system. Working Shibboleth implementations are being demonstrated at the Fall 2002 Internet2 Member Meeting being held here today.

Shibboleth enables inter-institutional sharing of web resources subject to access controls, as is often required in classes offered jointly by multiple universities. It permits off-campus students with broadband connections to access licensed, digital-library content transparently, and allows scientists and faculty to share research web sites securely with remote colleagues.

"After two months of using Shibboleth to manage web course material at North Carolina State University, we saw an 80- to 85-percent drop in our help desk calls," said John Hopkins, physics instructor at Pennsylvania State University. "That's an incredible return, freeing up instructors and staff for other responsibilities.”

The architecture emphasizes federated administration, access control based on attributes rather than identity, and active management of privacy to provide a scalable and extensible framework for inter-institutional authorization. Though similar in function to Microsoft's Passport and the Liberty Alliance effort, Shibboleth has had privacy considerations engineered in from the beginning.

The Shibboleth software was developed under the auspices of the National Science Foundation's Middleware Initiative (NMI). The software is expected to ship in early December 2002. The National Science Digital Library, a major NSF educational initiative, will use Shibboleth in its infrastructure for accessing customized or restricted content and services.

Institutions currently involved in the pilot test program include: Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Georgetown University, the London School of Economics, New York University, Ohio State University, Penn State, the University of Colorado, the University of Michigan, the University of Washington, the University of Wisconsin - Madison, the University of California Office of the President, EBSCO, Elsevier, OCLC, SFX, WebAssign, and WebCT.

Shibboleth is a project of Internet2 to develop architectures, policy structures, practical technologies, and open source implementations. For more information about the Internet2 Middleware Initiative and Shibboleth, see: http://middleware.internet2.edu/shibboleth/

About Internet2(R)

Led by over 200 U.S. universities, working with industry and government, Internet2 is developing and deploying advanced network applications and technologies for research and higher education, accelerating the creation of tomorrow's Internet. Internet2 recreates the partnerships among academia, industry, and government that helped foster today's Internet in its infancy. For more information about Internet2, see: http://www.internet2.edu/

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