Information Systems and Services and Java

Further to my previous post, I've just recieved this email from Alistair Young:

From: Alistair Young
Subject: Re: free gift in your pigeon holes
Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 13:47:40 +0100

Hi folks,

The Guanxi IdP is written in Java, as is the Shibboleth one. The only C++ implementation is the Shibboleth SP.

The Guanx IdP makes life a little easier for a user to deploy in that it creates it's own self-signed certificate and puts it in it's own keystore. It also creates a Shibboleth compatible X509 for you to drop into your SP. The Gx IdP also doesn't use DOM3 as there's no requirement to sign SAML Attribute Assertions in the Shibboleth profile (which isn't really a standard, it's just an unofficial SAML Profile). The UNICODE problem is a DOM3 issue, rather than a Shibboleth one. It came up when testing the original Shibboleth IdP in Bodington. You need DOM3 to sign Shibboleth assertions due to the non-standard ID attribute involved but as I said, it's not required.

The Gx IdP It can be run in two modes - standalone or embedded. It runs embedded in the Bodington VLE and takes advantage of the bod environment to turn it into an IdP with no modification to Bodington.

The Guanxi SP, which is due soon, is a Java SP that differs from the Shibboleth one in that the Gx SP is distributed. It's based on web services and uses WS-CallBack to allow the core SAML Engine to be deployed/clustered anywhere on the net, with an army of Guards deployed to protect resources. It uses SAML2 metadata to form trust relationships between the Engine(s) and Guard(s). This lets you deploy a Guanxi Engine farm that takes care of the heavy duty SAML/ Shibboleth traffic, while the Guards just initiate the process and are notified when the attributes are ready.

Lastly, Guanxi also includes SAMUEL - a lightweight SAML1.1 Java toolkit. The Gx IdP and SP both use this. SAMUEL differs from openSAML in that SAMUEL has no Shibboleth functionality. It's a pure SAML1.1 toolkit.

I'll wiki this at some point!

Alistair