Shibboleth

I did small researches on Shibboleth in Wiki and Shibboleth's web site :

Shibboleth (pronounced /ˈʃɪbəlɛθ/ or /ˈʃɪbələθ/) is any distinguishing practice which is indicative of one's social or regional origin. It usually refers to features of language, and particularly to a word whose pronunciation identifies its speaker as being a member or not a member of a particular group. The term originates from the Hebrew word "shibbólet", which literally means the part of a plant containing grains, such as an ear of corn or a stalk of grain or, in different contexts, "stream, torrent".

Shibboleth® System:

The Shibboleth System is a standards based, open source software package for web single sign-on across or within organizational boundaries. It allows sites to make informed authorization decisions for individual access of protected online resources in a privacy-preserving manner.

Because I have some library cataloguing experiences, this method reminds me of Dewey decimal classification. But under the name I can see that it uses a method similar to Object-oriented design to manage those individual accounts. Using this method, the account management will be able to manage the accounts more effectively and efficiently. Last September I joined a presentation sponsored by Deloitte Consulting. They introduced a role-based method to manage the identities in the industries and used a similar way to present how to manage the accounts. How is Shibboleth related to this role-based identity management? Perhaps we will ask our speaker again.

With the coupling of more technologies, Identity Management becomes more urgent not only in academia but also in industries. In ING, every year we test access controls to a large amount of financially significant applications. Without appropriate management on these access controls, the company or the university might incur great financial risk and reputational risk.