OpenAthens SP

OpenAthens SP provides an extensible work-flow and modular data-management platform for processing the data associated with identities. The OpenAthens SP Platform is protocol independent, which means that whatever protocol the content provider wishes to support it can be ‘dropped in’ and used with a minimum of effort.

This abstraction means that the content provider’s application does not need to be aware of which underlying protocol is being used. It also means that when content providers need to support a different protocol, there should be little need for code changes.

Protocol support comes in the form of plugin modules.

Modules that are currently available support the following assertion consumer standards:

• SAML 1.1 (Artifact and POST bindings)
• Shibboleth 1.2 and 1.3
• SAML 2.0 (HTTP-Redirect and Artifact bindings)
• OpenID

OpenAthens SP uses the concept of ‘work-flows’ to handle the details of the processing of protocols. There are a variety of specific pre-written work-flows that can be used to connect to various federations, such Shibboleth federations. If the profile of the protocol needed is different from these, then the standard work-flows can be modified, or new ones can be written from scratch. OpenAthens SP modules can also be written to support other protocols.

OpenAthens SP is fully cross-platform, with API support for:

Platform support:

• Windows (x86)
• Linux (x86 and x86_64)
• Solaris 8, 9 & 10 (sparc)
• FreeBSD 4.x, 5.x & 6.x (x86)

Java Platform support:

• JDK 1.4.x, 1.5.x, 1.6.x
• Tomcat 5.5
• WebSphere and WebLogic

Language support:

• Native C API
• ActiveX (Windows)
• Native Java API

Also, there are easy to setup web-server plugins available for:

• Apache 1.3, 2.0 and 2.2
• IIS 5.0, 5.1 and 6.0

These require no coding.