Shibboleth

Shibboleth was developed by the consortium Internet2, which encompasses more than 200 universities and research centres, in order to simplify access to internal and external resources and to make such access more secure. Version 1.0 was published in 2003.

Shibboleth provides for the set-up of an authentication system centralised between multiple services, as well as the propagation of identities between these services. The goal of identity propagation is twofold: to delegate authentication to the user’s original establishment and to retrieve certain user attributes (to manage access control or to personalise content). Like the module for Apache HTTP Server, a number of extensions have been developed to allow various systems to interface with Shibboleth.
Shibboleth is distributed under the Apache License 2.0.
It is written in Java and C++.