The University of West London

Shibboleth

About Shibboleth

Shibboleth is an open source and open standards method of enabling institutions to manage authentication whilst service providers deal with authorisation. Institutions can also act as service providers. Shibboleth technology will offer a means by which University of West London can authenticate individuals and then pass the information about them to service providers whilst maintaining complete privacy for the individual. Service providers will use the information provided by University of West London to authorise access as appropriate.

Using Shibboleth technology will reduce the amount of administrative effort and the number of passwords in use whilst improving security and ease of access. It will establish access to online resources either directly using Shibboleth technology or via the Shibboleth-Athens gateway. This will ensure that services from providers who have not yet implemented the new technology will continue to be available.