Novell today announced it has contributed portions of Novell® eDirectory™ to the FreeRADIUS and Samba open source projects, allowing any open source developer to tap Novell’s identity management infrastructure and use eDirectory for their authentication engine. Novell eDirectory is the foundation for Novell Nsure® identity and access management solutions, providing an identity vault for user, device and application data and the policies that govern them.
Specifically, Novell is contributing the code necessary to leverage previously unpublished security-related eDirectory APIs (application programming interfaces) for secure authentication. These contributions provide a blueprint that enables other vendors and open source projects to implement some of the same industry-leading security capabilities enjoyed today by users of Novell eDirectory. It also makes secure authentication possible for protocols that have been unable to support LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) in the past.
“LDAP provides an effective interface for many directory-enabled applications,” said Alan DeKok, FreeRADIUS project leader. “With Novell's contribution to the FreeRADIUS project, applications and devices that are built on RADIUS now have the option of providing secure authentication using the widely deployed eDirectory.”
Jeremy Allison, Samba co-author added, “This is of great benefit to the Samba project. It allows us to integrate secure, single sign-on authentication for Windows clients using Samba Domain controllers with the award winning Novell eDirectory. CIFS and SMB clients can now share integrated authentication in the customer enterprise environment.”
Novell has also written the code necessary for eDirectory integration with the FreeRADIUS project, enabling Novell customers to use FreeRADIUS for wireless authentication services with eDirectory. In addition, the next version of eDirectory will ship with support for FreeRADIUS.
David Litwack, Novell senior vice president and general manager for Identity-Driven Products, said, “Novell's contribution to the open source community enables any open source application to tie into the number one directory in the market. Novell eDirectory was the first directory to support Linux, and now its powerful security and authentication capabilities are available to open source projects up the stack as well.”
The eDirectory code is now posted to the FreeRADIUS and Samba projects at http://www.freeradius.org and http://www.samba.org respectively. For more information about Novell eDirectory, please visit www.novell.com/edirectory.
Novell, Inc. (Nasdaq: NOVL) is a leading provider of information solutions that deliver secure identity management (Novell Nsure™), Web application development (Novell exteNd™) and cross-platform networking services (Novell Nterprise™), all supported by strategic consulting and professional services (Novell NgageSM). Active in the open source community with its Ximian® and SUSE Linux brands, Novell provides a full range of Linux products and services for the enterprise, from the desktop to the server. Novell’s vision of one Net – a world without information boundaries – helps customers realize the value of their information securely and economically. For more information, call Novell’s Customer Response Center at (888) 321-4CRC (4272) or visit www.novell.com. Press should visit www.novell.com/pressroom.
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