What is Authentic?
Authentic is a Liberty-compliant identity provider aiming to address a broad range of needs, from simple to complex setups. Its Liberty compliance relies on Lasso, a free (GNU GPL) implementation of the Liberty Alliance specifications.
It is a Quixote application and is commonly run inside Apache web server.
Features
Liberty conformance
While not certified itself Authentic implements Liberty protocols (ID-FF 1.2 and ID-WSF) through the use of Lasso that has been certified as conformant to Liberty specifications in May 2005. Authentic implements every feature required by the Identity Provider Conformance Matrix.
Additionally it has several extra features; for example it can act as a proxy identity provider, redirecting requests from service providers to other identity providers; or sharing identity attributes through ID-WSF Personal Profile (with an appropriate version of Lasso).
Performance
The underlying components are quite fast and Authentic doesn't slow things down. There are no hard measure yet but a quick benchmark using autobench yielded more than 300 requests per second on a simple laptop (Centrino 1.6GHz, 1GB RAM).
This benchmark was made the test using the following command:
autobench --file perf_authentic.csv --single_host --uri1 [appropriate
URL]
Using this autobench configuration file produced a CSV file, source of the above figure.
Ease of Administration
Authentic has a nice and useful web administrative interface; it provides convenient identity management and log analysis. It also has its share of parameters so it adapts to different needs without any code change.
Thanks
Administration interface design and artwork from DotClear, a great weblog tool.