JISC to cut off Athens funding in 2008.(Joint Information Systems Committee, athens content access control system)(Brief article)

Byline: Kim Thomas

JISC, the publicly funded advisory body for higher and further education, has said it will stop funding the Athens content access control system in July 2008.

JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) has opted instead for open standards architecture Shibboleth, which it believes offers greater sophistication and security than Athens, currently used by 671 institutions in the UK.

Instead of maintaining a central database of users with access rights, as Athens does, Shibboleth will allow institutions to maintain their own database of users, and decide what level of access rights those users have.

"There is demand for a much richer authentication procedure to give a finer level of granularity," said JISC's services operations director John Robinson. JISC has spent [pounds sterling]6.5m on developing Shibboleth, which is fast emerging as the global standard of access authentication in education.

Shibboleth uses secure authentication markup language (SAML) to send secure messages across public networks. Robinson said this allowed institutions to act as ...