PHP managed card provider

Here's a new managed card provider from Patrick Patterson at  Carillon Information Security Inc.  With commendable understatement, Patrick writes:


I just thought that you'd like to know about a demonstration STS for issuing managed infocards that we've just finished.It's written in PHP, backends into either a database or LDAP, and is easily customizable to accommodate custom claims.

And, since it is written in PHP, it is easily deployable for those that want to experiment with a CardSpace STS, but who may not have either a JSP server to deploy one of the other Java based implementations, or an IIS .NET server to experiment with the one Microsoft has provided.

It is available here.

I'm a sucker for PHP and Ruby on Rails, so I love seeing this support.  Beyond that, I'm interested in Carillon's support for certificates. 

What is it?

The Carillon STS is a PHP-based Federated Identity Provider (IdP) which is capable of acting as a Secure Token Service (STS) compatible with Windows CardSpace and other “infocard” implementations. It has been successfully tested with CardSpace, as well as with Chuck Mortimore's Firefox identity selector plugin.

Once installed and configured, the Carillon STS allows a user to authenticate himself, either by password or by X.509 certificate, whereupon he is issued a digitally signed infocard containing some standard identity claims and optionally some customizable identity claims. When he presents this infocard to a Relying Party's (RP's) site, his browser's identity selector requests a SAML token from the Carillon STS. If the authentication information is still valid, a digitally signed token will be issued with the various claims asserted. The browser takes this token, checks the digital signature, encrypts it for the RP, and passes it along. It is the RP's responsibility to decrypt the SAML token, check the digital signature, check the asserted claims, and make an access decision based on this information.

Current Status:

This project has been tested with available releases of Windows CardSpace and the Firefox identity selector plugin. There are several Relying Party (RP) sites on the web to test against; in particular, the xmldap.org RP is able to consume Carillon STS infocards and display their contents.

Version 0.01 is the initial release of the Carillon STS. It is presently under active development.

License:

The Carillon Demo STS is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

Carillon Demo STS is Copyright © 2007 Carillon Information Security Inc.

Download:

Note: Please hold down the SHIFT key while clicking on package you want to download to avoid file corruption.

Source: carillon-sts-0.01.tar.gz

I hope to meet Carillon at the next Interopathon.  It's really awe-inspiring to see this level of Information Card expertise developing spontaneously in the security and identity communities.  Congratulations, folks!

Published by

Kim Cameron

Work on identity.

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