INTERNET2
RELEASES PRIVACY-PRESERVING WEB AUTHORIZATION SOFTWARE
Open source Shibboleth software developed and tested by more than 20 leading
companies and universities
Blackboard, WebCT and WebAssign,
course management software providers, and EBSCO, JSTOR and SFX, online
information companies, have already begun to incorporate Shibboleth technology
into their products and services. Shibboleth has been widely tested with
over 20 leading universities and research institutions participating in pilot
deployments. SWITCH, the Swiss national research and education networking
organization has selected Shibboleth as their official authentication and authorization
architecture and the National Science Digital Library (NSDL), a major
educational initiative by the National Science Foundation, will use Shibboleth
to allow access to customized or restricted content and services.
"Shibboleth has made cross-institutional course management, content
management, portfolio management systems and other home grown applications, all
accessible through integrated and seamless online teaching and learning
environments across the enterprise,"said
Christopher Etesse, Senior Director of Technology at
Blackboard. "By combining Shibboleth with the open architecture of
the Blackboard Learning System, the academic community has gained a tremendous
solution for the next generation of online education."
"The availability of Shibboleth 1.0 is a major milestone in a long
road. The Coalition for Networked Information led much of the work
articulating the requirements for a system like Shibboleth some five years ago;
designing and building it has been a major effort that required the best talent
from the higher education community," said Dr. Clifford Lynch, Executive
Director for the Coalition for Networked Information. "We continue
to work with Internet2 and the broader community to validate and widely deploy
this essential and badly-needed infrastructure for inter-organizational
networked information applications. One of the first applications will be
managing access to content licensed by research libraries on behalf of their
campus communities. User privacy is a core value of these libraries, and
the adoption of Shibboleth in this area emphasizes the extent to which
Shibboleth's design fundamentally recognizes and honors user privacy."
"We are excited by the increasing momentum and dedication of the
developers, as demonstrated by the release of Shibboleth 1.0," said David Millman, Director of Research and Development at Academic
Information Systems,
"JSTOR has been looking for a replacement to the current IP authentication
model in the academic community," said David Yakimischak,
Chief Technology Officer for JSTOR, an online resource of scholarly
journals. "We see Shibboleth as the best current alternative, for it
provides simplicity, scalability, extensibility, and the protection of privacy
within an open, standard architecture. Our early prototypes with
Shibboleth have been successful, and we anticipate ever increasing interest and
demand from our participating academic institutions."
Shibboleth emphasizes federated administration and access control based on
attributes rather than identity to provide a scalable and extensible framework
for inter-institutional authorization. The Shibboleth software was
developed under the auspices of the National Science Foundation's Middleware
Initiative (NMI).
Institutions currently involved in the pilot program include: Carnegie Mellon
University, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Georgetown University,
London School of Economics, New York University, Ohio State University,
Pennsylvania State, University of Colorado, University of Michigan, University
of Texas Health Center at Houston, University of Washington, University of
Wisconsin -- Madison, University of California Office of the President,
Blackboard Inc., EBSCO, JSTOR, OCLC, SFX, WebAssign
and WebCT.
Shibboleth is an Internet2 project designed to develop architectures, policy
structures, practical technologies and open source implementations.
Shibboleth 1.0 has been tested with the Apache Web server on Red Hat Linux
versions 7.2 and 7.3, and on Solaris 2.8, with Microsoft Windows2000 versions
for both Apache and IIS expected to be available soon. For more
information about the Internet2 Middleware Initiative and Shibboleth, visit: http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/
About Blackboard Inc.
Blackboard Inc. was founded with a vision to transform the Internet into a
powerful environment for the education experience. Blackboard is a
leading provider of e-Education solutions serving the global needs of primary
and secondary schools, higher education, corporations and government
agencies. Blackboard is headquartered in
About Coalition for Networked Information (CNI)
CNI is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise
of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly
communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. Some 200
institutions representing higher education, publishing, network and
telecommunications, information technology, and libraries and library
organizations make up CNI's Members. CNI is
jointly sponsored by EDUCAUSE and the Association of Research Libraries.
For more information, visit www.cni.org.
About National Science Digital Library (NSDL)
NSDL is a digital library of exemplary resource collections and services,
organized in support of science education at all levels. Starting
with a partnership of NSDL-funded projects, NSDL is emerging as a center
of innovation in digital libraries as applied to education, and a community
center for groups focused on digital-library-enabled science education.
For more information, visit: www.nsdl.org.
About Internet2(R)
Led by over 200
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CONTACT:
Michelle Pollak
Internet2
(202) 331-5345
mpollak@internet2.edu