Shibboleth is a project of the Internet2 Middleware Initiative (http://middleware.internet2.edu/). It provides an architecture and an open-source implementation for a federated, identity-based authentication and authorization infrastructure. Groups of organisations or projects may develop a federation by agreeing on common security policies and practices. They can use SAML/Shibboleth protocols to manage single sign-on across domains. This removes the need for content providers to maintain usernames and passwords.

Authorisation is instead based on trusted user attributes supplied by trusted Identity providers (IdPs) and consumed by service providers (SPs) which then gate access to secure content.

We will introduce the main concepts of the Shibboleth architecture. In addition, we outline potential benefits for the entire TDWG architecture and present the current approach to federation within the EDIT project.