Project Moonshot

Many Enterprises and users already enjoy the benefits of using federated authentication to access web-based services, which allows users to authenticate against federated services using a single credential. This reduces the complexity and costs incurred in issuing and managing credentials, while providing accountability and protecting user privacy.

Moonshot is an exciting new project to bring these benefits to other types of applications that are not web-based. Specific protocols of interest include, but are not limited to, XMPP, SMTP, IMAP, POP3, SSH and NFS.

Moonshot also intends to address some of the current issues relating to web-based single sign-on, including discovery of the user's identity provider. Finally, Moonshot also provides a novel approach to establishing trust between network hosts and services, which may significantly improve the flexibility, robustness and scalability of federated services.