Regaining Single Sign-On Taming the Beast

摘要

It has been our effort at Ringling school to provide our campus community with the capability to uniformly access resources across multiple platforms. Empowering the user with a single sign-on capability has multifold benefits. Tt greatly improves user experience and relieves the user from the burden of remembering multiple user-id and password pairs. On the administrative side, help desk costs are noticeably reduced and security improved, as users are not tempted to 'store' multiple passwords in written form. In the Fall of 1998 we implemented a single sign-on framework that utilized Sun RPC to synchronize accounts and passwords across multiple systems on the network. Our approach was easy to deploy, did not require any client level software and we did not introduce a single point of failure. It is our objective to consolidate user administration systems by adhering to a Light Weight Directoiy Access Protocol (LDAP) based meta-direetory model while preserving a common, single end-user authentication information and the coordinated management of user account information. Therefore, we are implementing a new single sign-on system that utilizes LDAP and SUN RPC protocols. Our approach is secure, does not store passwords and does not introduce a single point of failure. Password resetting can be done seamlessly and transparently without the need for additional client software.