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Re: [LUG] Single sign on for 1 000 000 users

 

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Adrian Midgley wrote:
|
| How should this be implemented using FLOSS?
|
| Who should do the engineering?

It is relatively straight forward technically, people building LDAP
servers just boost up multiple read only replica's to scale the technology.

Even the updates on a million users won't exceed modern technology, kind
of like the DNS.

Delegation of DNS is for management and update reasons, the entire
public DNS databases could probably be implemented on relatively small
number of central servers these days, but no one is seriously proposing
to do it that way (afaik).

The problem with a 1,000,000 user authentication scheme is management
and scoping, what happens if it is compromised? All 1,000,000  peoples
details go walk about. If it goes wrong do we have a million idle
workers (ala DWP fiasco?). Who is going to understand and modify a
system to meet a million users diverse needs?

The solution of course is to build local systems that interoperate using
agreed standards. Moves the management headache into agreeing and
controlling the standards.

The technical aspects of the problem are easy, I mean if AOL can do
it.... I suspect there are probably ISPs out there who authenticate
similar numbers of users using FLOSS already.

Integrating other systems is possible if your authentication is seen as
a seperate modules (like PAM). But ISPs only have a limited scope in the
systems they need to integrate, they only provide a gateway in to most
of the systems their users need, and making that integration is probably
the major technical headache for most ISPs.

Some of the ISPs are moving now to sharing authentication service out to
other sites, so you can use the login at one site to access services at
another.
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