Proxied authentication in single sign-on setups with common open source systems - an empirical survey

Abstract

The paper presents results from an empirical study about the use of a single sign-on (SSO) system in an integrated open source system landscape for supporting team collaboration. A portal solution, enterprise content management system, groupware, business process management and enterprise search engine are used. The investigation shows that although it is easy to achieve SSO with the Web-based user interfaces of the information systems used, none of the systems was prepared to pass authentication tokens to the API of an integrated system or accept SSO tokens instead of username / password pairs for authentication against the API respectively. Different alternatives for achieving the desired functionality are presented and a recommendation for improvement of the affected information systems is derived.