Identity Providers & Federations:

( Integration Ongoing ) The eduGAIN service is intended to enable the trustworthy exchange of information related to identity, authentication and authorisation between the GÉANT (GN3) Partners' federations. The eduGAIN service will deliver this through co-ordinating elements of the federations' technical infrastructure and a policy framework controlling the exchange of this information.  The initial goal is to enable Pan-European Web Single Sign On (Web SSO) to both GÉANT services and to those provided by other communities represented by, or associated with, the GN3 Partners.

Standards & Technologies:

Security Assertion Markup Language  ( SAML , pronounced "sam-el" ) is an  XML -based  open standard  data format for exchanging  authentication  and  authorization  data between parties, in particular, between an  identity provider  and a  service provider . SAML is a product of the  OASIS  Security Services Technical Committee. SAML dates from 2001; the most recent update of SAML is from 2005.  The single most important problem that SAML addresses is the  web browser   single sign-on  (SSO) problem.
Liferay Portal  is a  free and open source   enterprise portal  written in  Java  and distributed under the  GNU Lesser General Public License and proprietary licenses. It is primarily used to power corporate  intranets  and  extranets . Liferay Portal allows users to set up features common to websites. It is fundamentally constructed of functional units called  portlets . Liferay is sometimes described as a  content management framework  or a  web application framework . Liferay's support for plugins extends into multiple programming languages, including support for  PHP  and  Ruby  portlets. Liferay is available bundled with a servlet container such as  Apache Tomcat .
The  Central Authentication Service  (CAS) is a  single sign-on  protocol for the  web . Its purpose is to permit a user to access multiple applications while providing their credentials (such as userid and password) only once. It also allows web applications to authenticate users without gaining access to a user's security credentials, such as a password. The name  CAS  also refers to a software package that implements this protocol. Although Liferay offers a sophisticated programming interface for developers, no programming skills are required for basic website installation and administration.
Shibboleth  is a 'single-sign in', or logging-in system for computer networks and the internet. It allows people to sign in, using just one 'identity', to various systems run by 'federations' of different organizations or institutions. The federations are often universities or public service organizations. The Shibboleth  Internet2   Middleware Initiative  project has created an architecture and open-source implementation for  Identity management  and  federated identity -based  authentication  and  authorization  (or  Access control ) infrastructure based on  Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML).