Abstract:

This document surveys the paradigm of virtualization in Web enabled environments and the integration with the Shibboleth System. Shibboleth is a standard base open source software package developed by the higher education community and its partners to authorize access to online resource through the use of login and attribute information maintained at the users home institution. Shibboleth allows user privacy to be maintained and provides a middleware protocol for trust relationships between users and resources. Shibboleth software implements widely used federated identity standards, principally OASIS' Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), an XML-based standard for exchanging authentication and authorization data between security domains. In this context, the paper reports the implementation of Virtlab, a project taking place at the "Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologia" (ULHT) which builds a platform for federated access to modular and configurable virtual network laboratories, supporting selective access to different levels of resources. Virtlab act as a fully integrated environment where diverse open source solutions and technologies are combined, demonstrating the use of Shibboleth for providing a federated single sign-on and attribute exchange framework to access remote virtual resources (Virtual Machines, Networks and Storage) through a Web interface. The project build a federation itself and can perform the necessary changes to enable integration with existing campus network and federated e-learning systems.

Keywords:

Virtualization, Shibboleth, Federation, Digital Identity.