News for and about the Internet2 community

[Michelle Pollak <>]

INTERNET2 RELEASES PRIVACY-PRESERVING WEB AUTHORIZATION SOFTWARE

Open source Shibboleth software developed and tested by more than 20 leading companies and universities

ANN ARBOR, MI -- Internet2 today announced the availability of Shibboleth
1.0, the first production version of software implementing a leading
online authorization architecture.  Shibboleth, which is
standards-based and open source, incorporates active privacy management
while enabling inter-institutional sharing of Web resources subject to
access controls.

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, Columbia University and member of the National
Science Digital Library (NDSL) Core Integration Team.  "NSDL
has long been committed to the Shibboleth technology because of its
scalable, distributed architecture and its privacy protections, both
critical goals of the NSDL itself."

"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 Washington, D.C., with offices and staff across North America, Europe
and Asia.  Visit
www.blackboard.com for more
information.

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 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, visit:
www.internet2.edu.

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CONTACT:
Michelle Pollak
Internet2
(202) 331-5345