Re-engineering of web reverse proxy with shibboleth authentication

Majority of web authentication is implemented using username and password mechanism. How about leveraging the Shibboleth authentication advantages as an alternative to username and password based authentication to access a live web site? This challenge is trivial if, the codes that built the external web sites are permissible to be modified. In a case where no access on the codes is available, we introduce a reverse proxy as a middleware between the Shibboleth and the web sites. As part of the solution, we re-engineer the existing web reverse proxy and create Java classes that manage and perform automated authentication to access the web site. We share the development experiences in completing the challenge which is assisted by the open source development efforts.