[dgAIS] MACS and AIS

[Mario D . Santana]

Hello, all.

I'm working on a project called MACS (the Modular Access Control 
System) which doesn't do cross-site SSO at the moment but would like to 
in the near future.  Instead of reinventing the wheel, I'd like to use 
AIS in whole or in part for this purpose.  In conversations with David 
Nicol, I've also heard that AIS might benefit from using MACS as the 
underlying authentication system.  I'd like to look into an integration 
of the two in the next weeks, and am hoping for some feedback, advice 
on how to go about it, or whether it even makes sense.  And help.  =)

The bird's-eye view of MACS is that it's an Identity and Access 
Management" solution -- a sort of meta-auth system.  It's designed so 
that all the authentication, authorization, and user/profile operations 
it serves up can be handled by 3rd-party systems via what we call 
"Method Adapters."  So, for example, a user could authenticate with 
their Yahoo! password, access content A according to permissions in 
Samba share B, and have it personalized according to information in an 
LDAP customer database.  (Sort of a griffon of an example, but there it 
is... ;-)

More information about MACS can be found at http://macs.sf.net/

Cheers.

mds