Unicon Announces Services for Shibboleth Federating Software for Secure Single Sign On and Authentication

EDUCAUSE Conference 2008

Unicon, Inc., the leading provider of open source software consulting services for the education market, today announced it is providing implementation, integration, and customization services for the Shibboleth® System, a standards based, open source software package for Web single sign-on across or within organizational boundaries. As security, privacy, and identity theft grows more prevalent throughout the Internet, it is important that academic institutions have the technologies, tools, and solutions to implement state-of-the-art safeguards for its students, faculty, and administrators. Unicon’s higher education services group is experienced with implementing secure authentication and identity management solutions based on open source technologies, including JASIG’s Central Authentication Service (CAS). Shibboleth and CAS can be highly complementary solutions by providing both localized secure authentication as well as meeting federated standards.

“We’re pleased that a company with Unicon’s extensive experience and strong reputation will now be offering services for Shibboleth,” said Ken Klingenstein, Director of the Internet2 Middleware and Security Initiative. “Unicon is already a leader in implementing open source solutions for higher education institutions. This move will be a great benefit to the Shibboleth community and also for organizations needing commercial services for their Shibboleth implementation.”

“We’ve hit the tipping point this year where there are enough valuable services requiring SAML assertions for user access that forward-thinking institutions are now eager to implement Shibboleth as part of their Identity Management strategy,” said John A. Lewis, Chief Software Architect for Unicon, Inc. “These institutions will experience a greater ability to collaborate beyond their own organization while also securing and simplifying management of their confidential personal data.”

Mr. Klingenstein will also deliver a briefing at the Unicon booth # 850 at the EDUCAUSE Conference from 6:30 – 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday, October 28, 2008. His presentation is titled, “SAML, Shibboleth and Federations – A Trust and Attribute Layer for the Internet”.

Unicon Services for Shibboleth Include:
Implementation planning
Branding and user experience
Installation and configuration
Custom development
Shibboleth integration with uPortal, Sakai, and other applications

Unicon’s consulting group has provided over 175 colleges and universities with open source enterprise portals, applications, and related services and support for online campus deployments.

About Shibboleth

The Shibboleth System is a standards-based, open source software package for web single sign-on across or within organizational boundaries. It allows sites to make informed authorization decisions for individual access of protected online resources in a privacy-preserving manner. The Shibboleth software implements widely used federated identity standards, principally OASIS’ Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), to provide a federated single sign-on and attribute exchange framework. Shibboleth also provides extended privacy functionality allowing the browser user and their home site to control the attributes released to each application. Using Shibboleth-enabled access simplifies management of identity and permissions for organizations supporting users and applications. Shibboleth is developed in an open and participatory environment, is freely available, and is released under the Apache Software License. For more information, visit: http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/

Shibboleth Single Sign-on and Federating Software addresses the challenges of:
Multiple passwords required for multiple applications
Scaling the account management of multiple applications
Security issues associated with accessing third-party services
Privacy
Interoperability within and across organizational boundaries
Enabling institutions to choose their authentication technology
Enabling service providers to control access to their resources

About Unicon

Unicon, Inc. specializes in providing software consulting services including software engineering, systems integration, and the delivery of technology solutions and support. The company effectively utilizes open-source frameworks, applications and software to provide enterprise-level portal, collaboration, learning, messaging and secure authentication solutions for higher education institutions worldwide. Unicon is a commercial affiliate for Sakai and uPortal and also provides services for CAS (Centralized Authentication Services), Shibboleth, and Zimbra. Unicon strives to base its solutions on standards-based, open-source technology for increased productivity and reduced costs. For more information, visit: www.unicon.net.

Unicon is a Registered Trademark of Unicon, Inc. All other product or service names are the property of their respective owners.
Contacts

Company Contact:
Jim Layne
Unicon, Inc.
480-558-2444
jlayne {at} unicon(.)net
or
Media Contact:
Joe Waldygo
TopSpin Communications, Inc.
480-632-5050
joe {at} topspinpr(.)com