Shibboleth is standards-based, open source federating software that provides Web Single SignOn (SSO) across or within organizational boundaries. It allows sites to make informed authorization decisions for individual access of protected online resources in a privacy-preserving manner. Shibboleth reduces time needed to manage access to protected resources, increases security, and interoperates with similar standards-based solutions. Using Shibboleth-enabled access simplifies management of identity and access permissions for both identity and service providers.
Continuing its past success, Shibboleth was named as one of the Top 10 emerging technologies by MIT Technology Review during 2006. Adoption of and interest in Shibboleth continued to expand, perhaps most notably in the GridShib effort, a National Science Foundation project between NCSA and the University of Chicago that is working to integrate Shibboleth with the Globus Toolkit to provide attribute-based authorization for distributed scientific communities. The Shibboleth project team released version 1.3 during 2006, and has already begun work on version 2.0.