Shibboleth Developers

["Barry R Ribbeck" <>]

All  
   Since we are a big Sun One and Java shop so I thought I will 
volunteer to be the scout sent out to draw fire.

1)  I have not heard any mention of support or functional testing of 
Shib from within Sun and we really haven't seen or heard of any efforts 
within Sun to officially state a working recipe, for shib.  In theory it 
really should work, but I have not seen or heard of anyone making the 
attempt.  This could be from my lack of attention of late.

2)  One of the things that I like about the Sun One web servers is their 
LDAP support and the way they handle cert authentication.  This could 
work well within the Shib model and extend in a positive direction the 
work that Ryan Muldoon has done at UW with Cert AuthN.  There seems to 
be just a small piece that is missing from making this work very well.   
The small piece that is missing in Apache that Sun does well with certs 
is the test for presence of  the cert in LDAP before populating remote 
user.  This is a great control  mechanism and I wish I had the time to 
install Shib with a Sun One web server to test it out.

3)  I am very surprised to see Microsoft beating Sun to the door on this 
one.  With their work in the Liberty camp, you would think they would be 
breaking down the door to get at Shib as an implementation extender, but 
it has been very quite at least from our perspective.  Maybe its time to 
shake things up.

4)  What is Sun doing in the Shib / Grid  arena?


5) We all have lots of Sun One Directory Servers, does Sun see Shib as a 
natural next step or are they more focused on Liberty Federations?

Comments, conflicting opinions and stones are welcome.
Barry

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