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[Greg Wood <>]

Contact:
Greg Wood, Internet2

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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