FACIUS: An Easy-to-Deploy SAML-based Approach to Federate Non Web-Based Services

Federated identity management yields many advantages such as enhanced usability and improved quality of identity information. Web-based services are already successfully and widely federated using the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML). In terms of usability and quality of identity information non web-based services benefit from being federated in a similar way web-based services do. However, up to this point no versatile approach that can be easily integrated has emerged to federate them. In this paper, we present FACIUS, an architecture that enables the integration of non web-based services into SAML-based federations. FACIUS aims at minimizing the integration effort in terms of both usability and necessary adjustments to existing service deployments. Furthermore, to prove the practicability of the proposed architecture, we present an implementation to federate SSH services.