"Whether good or bad, the situation won't last much longer. In mid-1999, with little reaction considering the source, Microsoft announced its Passport service. Passport is a single sign-on solution built on Microsoft technology. At the time, it seemed that Microsoft would just leverage its large Hotmail user database and the intellectual property the company gained after acquiring Firefly to drive users to other Microsoft properties, such as MSN (Microsoft Network) or other partner properties. It wasn't until Microsoft unveiled .Net, announced the first services that required Passport, and clarified its plans to wire Passport into every piece of technology they control, that the industry woke up and took notice. One outcome of that awakening: the Liberty Alliance Project."
"Web Services are arguably the most heterogenous distributed technology ever. A typical Web services setup will make use of many different technologies, object models and programming languages, which might include simple Perl scripts and standalone Web services implemented in C++ or Java, through to sophisticated applications build on top of J2EE application servers. Being able to interact across such diverse environments is one of the strengths of Web services, but it has a price: it becomes difficult to secure such systems. It is hard to find a common security standard for all involved technologies. Today we will talk about single sign-on, the security architecture that brings a flexible an interoperable way of securing heterogenous systems."
"In this article, you have seen how to integrate Java Open Single Sign-On in Apache's Pluto portlet container. If you're in a hurry, you will find a bundle at the JOSSO site with Tomcat 5.0.28, Pluto 1.0.1-rc1, and JOSSO 1.2, which can be downloaded from sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=116854."
"Does your enterprise run many coexisting Java applications, each requiring authentication in order to access enterprise resources? If so, you'll probably want to implement single sign-on (SSO) security functionality to make authentication less intrusive for your users. In this article, you'll learn how to implement SSO using Kerberos and the Java Generic Security Services API (GSS-API). First we'll cover what SSO means and illustrate its potential applications. Then we'll explore the sequence of message exchanges that occurs to implement Kerberos-based SSO. Next, we'll briefly introduce the Java GSS-API and the architecture of a typical Java application that accomplishes SSO using GSS. Finally, we'll put the pieces together and provide working code examples to demonstrate how Java developers can implement SSO with GSS Kerberos tickets."
