Investigation and implementation of Shibboleth SSO authentication mechanism through a specific scenario

Book excerpt: This work titled ‘Investigation and implementation of Shibboleth SSO mechanism through a case scenario’ presents, discusses, describes and explains the major aspects and concepts of Shibboleth protocol and provides two related prototypes implementations of the protocol within a set of chosen tools and environments. The implementation relies on the project client specifications and recommendations and therefore follows some imposed deployment infrastructures. The work report first focuses on the research investigation in Shibboleth concepts, its relationship with similar mechanisms and its particularities in the Single Sign On mechanism alongside with its federation principles. It also emphasizes on the SAML (Security Assertion Mark-up Language), the protocol that Shibboleth implements and on which it relies. The second major part of this report describes step by step the installation, deployment and configurations of Shibboleth in working prototypes within Windows based Operating Systems. The primary prototype implementation is a sort of initial deployment carried out within a self-defined ad-hoc environment helping to implement the second prototype. Considered in this project as the real time prototype as it has been conducted within the client premises, the second prototype has some similar steps of the primary implementation and is much more complete in terms of applications integrations and the Shibboleth log out mechanism. It also focuses more on the client specifications. The end of this real time prototype provides the integration strategy of 247lib.com/247libDE application. A testing approach is then provided to demonstrate how successful sample of simple applications have been integrated into the implementation. The test illustrates with details description the main use case scenario of authentication through the Shibboleth based single sign on mechanism. The appendix part of this report and the CD bound to the report include the configuration files of the project implementation, the testing data and other project details. The project report finally discusses the encountered risks and issues faced throughout the project progress alongside with a critical appraisal and recommendations for future works.