Shibboleth documentation and HOWTOs

Please see Shibboleth Identity Provider 2012 Upgrade if you interact with Raven over the Shibboleth protocol. You may need to take action to ensure your service continues to work.

Deploying Shibboleth SPs in the University

This page provides information about deploying Shibboleth Service Providers (SPs) within the University, either just to protect sites with Raven or with a view to joining the UK federation and potentially letting in people from other institutions. This information is intended to support the deployment of version 2.x of the Shib SP software provided by Internet2 - other versions of this, and other software, should work but the Computing Service currently has limited direct experience of anything else. Note that version 1.3 of the Internet2 SP software reaches the end of its support life on 30th June, 2010.

The definitive documentation for all this starts with the Internet2 Shib2 wiki (in particular the installation and configuration pages). Almost everything you might need will be here, but you may need to explore - try following any and all links that look even vaguely useful. The Shibboleth-Users mailing list can be a useful resource, as can its archives (but be sure you are finding fresh information - the archives go back a long way).

For deploying an SP in the UK federation, see the UK federation website, and in particular the 'Shibboleth 2' section of Entity registration.

These documents are intended for the system administrator that will be installing and maintaining a Shibboleth service provider in the University of Cambridge. This may be a different person than the application developer who will actually be using the attributes which Shibboleth delivers, though they may find some of this information relevant as well. The following basic skills are expected of the reader, and are beyond the scope of what these documents attempts to cover:

• familiarity with the local operating system, including how to install software (on some UNIX systems this may involve compiling packages from source code)
• configuring the local web server (Apache, IIS, etc)
• basic understanding of XML documents (but see Editing XML for some hints)

In addition, a basic understanding of SSL, including how to generate a key and CSR, will be required for many deployment options.

Instructions

• Installing SP2.x under Linux
• Installing SP2.x under Windows
• Installing SP2.x for Apache under Windows
• Installing SP2.x under MacOS

• SP registration
• Configuring access control
• Virtual hosting issues

Additional information

• Editing XML
• EntityIDs
• SP Metadata
• Attributes released by the Raven IdP
• SSL, certificates and security
• FAQs

Resources

• 'Ucam Federation' IdP metadata
• shibboleth2.xml - internal use skeleton
• attribute-map.xml - internal use skeleton

Other University Shibboleth information

• A University Shibboleth Glossary
• Athens Gateway access control

Shibboleth Implementation Project documents

These documents, originally working document belonging to the Computing Service's Shibboleth Development Project, are retained for historical and reference purposes.

• Shibboleth Attribute Usage and Derivation
• Assigning Athens permissions sets
• Data Protection issues with Shibboleth
• Using the Shibboleth to Athens Gateway
• Athens DA Protocol
• More on eduPersonPrincipleName