Authenticating from multiple authentication sources in a collaborative platform

• Published in: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation pp. 229 - 234
• Main Authors: Vu Dang, Quang, Berger, Olivier, Bac, Christian, Hamet, Benoît
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Boston, MA Springer US
• Series: IFIP — The International Federation for Information Processing
• Subjects: Authentication Mechanism; Authentication Service; Identity Federation; Identity Provider; Legacy User
• DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-72486-7_20
• ISBN: 9780387724850; 0387724850
• ISSN: 1571-5736

This paper presents a proposal to address the need for multiple authentication sources for users of collaborative work platforms. The proposed approach, developed for the needs of GET and Picolibre, relies on a generic solution that integrate groupware servers in a Shibboleth infrastructure. We have developed adapters for this integration, that we contributed to the phpGroupware project. This document should serve as a basis for discussion in order to validate the level of generality of the proposed approach. We hope that this approach can also help maintainers of other collaboration platforms, who want to integrate a park of deployed platforms with external user identification and authentication services, get a better view of solutions available with Shibboleth.