[Building Sakai] Integration of Shibboleth Authentication with Sakai

[Julian Fleischer]

Hi everyone,

we at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Freie Universität Berlin are working at employing Sakai for the administration of courses and as our primary virtual learning environment. We are however forced by the central IT administration of our university (Zedat) to do the authentication via Shibboleth (http://shibboleth.net/).

I found this page in the confluence wiki (https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/DOC/Sakai+Admin+Guide+-+Advanced+Configuration+Topics) which mentions "Shibbing Sakai with Guanxi", but I do not even grasp what Guanxi *is* from this link.

On that same page is also a web service (SakaiPortalLogin Web Service) mentioned, which would completely work for us - however, that Webservice seems not to exist within the 2.9.x branch?!

It would help a lot if we knew
- how authentication/login is done in Sakai
- to what extend Spring Security is used in Sakai
- is a working shibboleth solution out there already?
- if a solution as described in the SakaiPortalLogin Web Service is possible (if we could create sessions by means of a shared secret that would be enough to help us out)

All documentation that I could find in the Wiki seems to target Sakai 2.4 or 2.5 or "is an attempt to document a new feature in Sakai 2.xxx". Is there a more or less current documentation of the related interfaces?

cheers,
Julian Fleischer