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Web Single Sign-On (SSO) Toolkit

Introduction

The Single Sign-On (SSO) toolkit allows software providers to integrate support for SSO into their applications in an industry standard manner. The toolkit provides a reference implementation to show developers exactly how to use the SAML 2.0 standards to accomplish SSO. More importantly, the toolkit explains the concepts behind the standard. The developer is not expected to read voluminous and dry standards documents in order to learn. Those standards documents become the reference for the toolkit, something to look at when the exact syntax is needed.

This toolkit builds upon work by many other organizations, most notably the Internet2 project and their OpenSAML toolkit.

Why is this important?

Real estate professionals are using more systems and applications than ever, and they don’t want to have to log into each one separately. The inconvenience and inefficiency of multiple logins are exacerbated when users have to go back and forth between one system and another. As a result, system providers such as MLSs, transaction management software, larger brokerages and other real estate application vendors have moved to provide login integration of commonly used systems as a convenience for the users. This is referred to as Single Sign-On (SSO).

Why was this toolkit created?

Clareity Consulting gathered many major MLS vendor, transaction management vendor, association management vendor, public records provider, franchise, and other major real estate organization CTOs in Las Vegas for two meetings (December 2005 and March 2006) to agree on secure standards for SSO, and the group agreed on SAML 2.0. The group requested that Clareity Security, as a neutral party, create a reference implementation to help ensure that different implementations of the standard would work well together and to lower the barrier to entry for SAML adoption. This toolkit was developed by Clareity Security with funding from the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION of REALTORS® Center for REALTOR® Technology.