Web Initial Sign-On
Overview
Web Initial Sign-On (WEB-ISO, sometimes called Single Sign-on) refers to  systems designed to allow users to authenticate to web-based services across many web servers using a central authentication service.  The user does not have to authenticate (i.e sign-on)  multiple times to each different server or service.  

We embrace a model of fewer sign ons rather than single sign-on knowing that different applications have different acceptable levels of risk.  A WebISO solution should not be used as an authentication method for sensitive applications like medical records, monetary transactions, and certain student information.  We propose providing a single sign-on service for an umbrella set of services with similar levels of risk e.g. the portal..  

We are closely following Internet2 Web-ISO efforts in this space to leverage our startup and resource requirements, to contribute to national effort based on our University's needs and to align ourselves with developing cross- institution authentication technologies for information sharing aka as the Shibboleth.   

Project Description
Our initial project approach is to get the pubcookie login server and the Apache and IIS web server modules in our environment using netid and password to authenticate using LDAP to our directory server.  Once this evaluation and test environment is operational, we can begin to test and integrate different types of applications with the pubcookie modules.  At a minimum, our analysis should yield strengths,  weaknesses of the implementation and a recommendation to proceed or not to proceed with this architecture. In addition, we will identify areas that must be reworked and rewritten to accommodate our needs.

If the recommendation is to proceed, we will identify a candidate app to integrate with pubcookie and implement the infrastructure necessary to move the WebISO architecture  into production. 

See project description submitted to e-Infrastructure.

Look here for Plan

PubCookie Evaluation and Test Environment
PubCookie  Review (mod_pubcookie v1.64 and pub_cookie login v1.30 authored by Ryan Muldoon 

Status of our the Pubcookie Test 

Perl Coding Guidelines authored by Jon Miner

Other University Single Signon Approaches
UW Washington Authentication Service (Pubcookie)

Yale's Central Authentication Services (CAS)

Ohio State distauth Authentication

Commercial Single Signon Approaches
Microsoft Passport

Sun's and others Liberty Alliance Project

WebISO project team.
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Revised: January 17, 2002 .