It is particularly difficult to bolt a single sign-on solution -- SSO, the ability to log in once and be authenticated to all your network resources -- onto existing applications, but every developer faces this problem when building sophisticated portals. Because . . .
It is particularly difficult to bolt a single sign-on solution -- SSO, the ability to log in once and be authenticated to all your network resources -- onto existing applications, but every developer faces this problem when building sophisticated portals. Because portals need to integrate with back-end resources, each with its own authentication needs, the portal often has to provide the appearance of single sign-on to the user. In this article, Chris Dunne provides a step-by-step description of his experience with building a single sign-on solution for a Web portal. He shows you how to set up an open source solution, the Central Authentication Service from Yale University, and how to extend it to authenticate to a Microsoft Active Directory infrastructure.

Through my own work I have seen the growth in demand for a variety of portal applications. Portals are becoming more and more sophisticated, with complex technical and functional requirements. Even though the tools are available to build simple portals, the issues of integrating them with remote or legacy data sources are not trivial. One such issue is authentication.

Authentication is a complex problem. Portals need to authenticate users to back-end data sources and applications, yet these applications may each have different underlying security infrastructures. And the ideal and most efficient authentication solution is a single sign-on one, or SSO, in which the user only has to log in once and is authenticated to all of the network resources.

The link for this article located at IBM is no longer available.