What is Aiakos?

Aiakos is an innovative distributed authentication system, based on Zope and Plone. Much of the heavy lifting is done using the LDAPUserFolder product by Jens Vagelpohl.

Aiakos allows you to provide a central sign-on system for a network of websites. All login and registration activity takes place on the central Aiakos server. Participating sites receive encrypted authentication packages from the authentication server, with which they can authenticate users.

Client libraries are provided for Microsoft Windows (as COM objects) and as a Zope Product for Plone 1. Plone 2 support is in CVS, but not in the main package. The central user database is stored on an LDAP server, and participating sites are provided with access to the LDAP server for complex user-related activity - however, most sites will never need this.

In addition a distributed event logging system is included, that allows interesting events to be recorded on participating sites, and then collected by a central server.

Features

Dependencies

For a complete Aiakos server installation, you will also need:

  1. A Zope 2 server
  2. Plone 1 (Plone 2 is supported in CVS experimentally, see here for instructions)
  3. An OpenLDAP server (or another LDAP v3 server)
  4. LDAPUserFolder
  5. CMFLDAP

License

Aiakos is Free Software. Aiakos is released under the GNU General Public License.

The Name Aiakos

Rhadamanthys, Minos, and Aiakos were the three judges of the Underworld in Greek mythology. All three were mortal men, sons of Zeus, who were granted this honour after death because of the wisdom of their judgements.

Aiakos was made guardian of the keys of the Hades and the judge of the men of Europe. Rhadamanthys was made lord of Elysion and judge of the men of Asia. Minos was the judge who held the final vote. Some say there was a fourth judge Triptolemos who presided over the souls of the Initiates of the Mysteries.