Blogs

December, 2016 On September 15, Unicon’s IAM team had their a quarterly Open Source Support briefing. The host of the webinar was Charise Arrowood (Sr.Director, Identity & Access Management Services), and the presenters were Mike Grady (IAM Architect), Dmitriy Kopylenko (IAM Developer), and John Gasper (IAM Consultant) .

November, 2016 You have paid your InCommon membership dues, your federation admins have been vetted, and you even uploaded your IdP metadata in the InCommon Federation Manager website. Like many new members, you are probably asking yourself, "Now what?"

June, 2016 RESTful APIs, while not new, have only recently seen adoption in portlets. Why? They are often used to expose a service. In the case of portlets, there is often a more complete service that the portlet fronts. Another common use is to provide the back end of single page applications. It is this later use that is likely to drive more RESTful APIs in portlets.

June, 2016 Recently, I had the opportunity to add a new testing suite to a portlet. That suite is Jasmine, a JavaScript testing framework. The Survey Portlet is a modern portlet which leverages AngularJS. The Angular controllers needed to be tested as part of the project. In most Maven-driven Java applications that I have seen there is no testing performed on JavaScript. Jasmine integration is a step to correct this common shortcoming.

November, 2015 A common task when running a SAML Identity Provider (IdP) is integrating additional SAML service providers (SP). This task is not a trivial one, especially when compared to integrating CAS clients. New IdP administrators can run into problems before they even start with the technical task at hand because they aren't given the correct information to be successful.

February, 2015 Many Shibboleth IdP adopters use LDAP as an authentication provider and an attribute source. There is always the question of "do we need to configure TLS/SSL for the IdP's connection to the LDAP server(s)?" My response is "always," because we need to protect the user's credentials even in the most trusted network

January, 2015 The shib-cas-authn extensions, developed as part of Unicon's Open Source Support program, is used to delegate the Shibboleth IdP's user authentication to a CAS Server. Whether the client application is a CAS client or a Shibboleth/SAML SP, the integration presents the user with a single SSO experience. Today, Unicon's IAM team released the next version of the shib-cas-authn extension.