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[higgins-dev] ALF project publishes updated documents on Single SignOn (SSO)

Dear Higgins community,
 
I would like to alert you to some documents on Single SignOn (SSO) from the Eclipse Application Lifecycle Framework (ALF) project that may be of interest.
 
Some background: ALF has a requirement to obtain a user security context from development tools when the user does something significant and the tool raises an ALF Event.  A typical consequence of an ALF Event is the triggering of a BPEL flow to update related tools to synchronize or adjust to that change.  The BPEL flow needs to communicate that security context through to all the programs that are invoked as a result of the event.
 
Said another way, the ALF SSO is intended to provide SSO for desktop, browser, server-based tools and especially tools with web service interfaces using a uniform and standard approach based on open source.  As part of the solution ALF has defined the need for an Security Token Server (STS).  One touchpoint with Higgins is that the STS needs to represent an individual (a Digital Subject) and associate that individual with different contexts (i.e. to determine the appropriate ID to present to each tool.)  ALF has written some documents describing the architecture, requirements, and design for the ALF SSO system and STS.  Also since ALF needs an STS, it will either need to build one or, better still, make use of one that IBM has had some discussions on the Higgins mailing list.  ALF has a near-term need for SSO, but ALF's focus on development tool interoperability and integration,  not security, so ALF is very interested in working closely with the Higgins project.
 
The newest in the series of documents on ALF Single-SignOn has been updated on the ALF website (http://www.eclipse.org/alf) to version 00.14:
 
http://www.eclipse.org/alf/includes/ALF_Security_Technology_and_Design_draft.pdf   The document covers the design and sources of technology to implement SSO  for ALF.  The goal of the document - to describe the design and technology  to be used in sufficient detail to allow the planning for implementing ALF  SSO to be accomplished - has been achieved.  The document includes an  Implementation Plan that phases the capabilities.  That document is ready for a thorough review.  We solicit community review, feedback and discussion.
  
The original document in the series, ALF Security Architecture: SSO (See: 
http://www.eclipse.org/alf/includes/ALF_Security_Architecture_SSO.pdf ) has also been updated to version 00.26.  The Architecture document covers the entities involved, protocols used, and architecture of the ALF SSO system.  The latest version on the ALF website updates the text and figures to flesh out some remaining sections of the document and reflect what has been learned during the Technology and Design effort.
 
You are invited to read both documents, especially the newer Design and Technology draft, and contribute to them by providing text, feedback,  implementation experiences, etc. Areas where feedback would be most welcome are:
 1. The assessment of the open source technologies proposed, (or are there better alternatives?) - that is, are we making the best technology choices for building ALF SSO?
 2. Does the ordering of the capabilities into implementation phases meet the community needs?
 3. Is anyone interested in helping to build the SSO system?
 
Regards,
Brian

Brian Carroll
Architect, Eclipse ALF project
www.eclipse.org/alf

Serena Fellow
Serena Software
(ofc)  (503) 617-2436
(cell)  (503) 318-2017
bcarroll@xxxxxxxxxx
 

 

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