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.

I. Introduction

Usemame and password is becoming a de facto standard in web authentication. It can be implemented using HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) form with input text fields to perform the authentication challenge and be part of user identification for a system. The idea is to provide unique identity to represent user to the system, as such only the user is indeed, the user claims to be.