Identity Future

InCommon, an identity management federation serving US higher education, announced that it is substantially expanding its community to include an additional ten universities, four service providers, and a private identity provider.

“The research and education community, which today depends upon online resources through its partnerships with content and service providers, has been at the forefront of deploying the federated identity management approach,” said Tracy Mitrano, director of Information Technology Policy, Cornell University and chair of the InCommon Steering Committee.

InCommon provides the framework for the partners and sponsors to share protected online information and resources. The resource sharing needs to be done in a highly secure manner while keeping the privacy of those who access this material just as safe. InCommon which uses Shibboleth Technology helps to ease the troubles of the partners by providing single sign-on capabilities to access multiple resources.

“To meet the increasing campus demand for using external applications and online resources, we developed and implemented solutions that efficiently use our existing information infrastructures securely and safely in such a way that we maintain control over the release of personal information for people at Penn State,” said Kevin Morooney, vice provost of Penn State University. “InCommon is a vitally important part of this infrastructure and helps put us in a position to provide a richer, easier to use, safer online experience for Penn State students, faculty, and staff.”

higher education, incommon, indentity management, universities

Oracle announced on December 6, 2006, the release of their new Identity Management Suite providing Single Sign-on. This suite will help to incorporate many of Oracle’s applications to help with access control and passwords.

“The availability of Oracle Enterprise Single Sign-On Suite further enables customers to improve security throughout their entire organizations and to more easily meet compliance mandates while reducing costs,” Hasan Rizvi, vice president of security and identity management products at Oracle, said in a statement.

The five elements that comprise this suite are:

• Logon Manager: Allows users to access their Web-based and legacy applications with a user name and password but without having to constantly change and update passwords
• Password Reset: Enables users to set or recover lost passwords through a protected self-service interface in Windows environments
• Authentication Manager: Lets businesses use a combination of tokens, smart cards, biometrics and passwords to manage access to applications throughout the network
• Provisioning Gateway: Allows businesses to control their identity administration software, such as Oracle Identity Manager, to provision application accounts that can be accessed through Single Sign-On Manager
• Kiosk Manager: Enables users to access applications in a secure manner at multi-user kiosks and workstations, so that users can work from several locations throughout the day

[tags]oracle, single sign-on, identity management suite[/tags]