Federated Authentication and Authorisation in the Social Science Domain

The use of Shibboleth as a mechanism for implementing federated authentication is commonplace in many countries. The ability of Shibboleth to transmit extra information about a user, including licenses, roles and other attributes, is not exploited for many reasons, mainly because institional Identity Providers (IdPs) are not maintainable sources of fine grained authorisation information. The JlSC-funded Shintau project has produced an extension to the Shibboleth profile which allows a user to link information from more than one IdP together utilising a custom Linking Service (LS). This paper describes both the application and independent evaluation of this software by the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow within the context of the ESRC-funded Data Management through e-Social Science (DAMES) project.