This page last changed on Mar 07, 2007 by rosie@atlassian.com.
Crowd is an application security framework that handles authentication and authorization for your web-based applications. With Crowd you can quickly integrate web applications into a single security architecture that supports single sign-on and centralized identity management.
The application is divided into two parts:
- The administration console is a clean and powerful web-interface to manage directories, users (known in Crowd as "principals") and their security rights.
- The integration API provides a platform neutral way to integrate web applications into a single security architecture. With the integration API, applications can quickly access user information or perform security checks.
Designed for ease of use, Crowd can be deployed with your existing infrastructure. Crowd supports Java, .NET and PHP. An unlimited number of directories can be configured. The directory servers can then be linked together providing applications with a single view to multiple directories.
Architectural Overview
The Crowd application is a middleware application that integrates web applications into a single security architecture that supports single sign-on and centralized identity management. The application works by dispatching authentication and authorization calls to configured directory servers. An unlimited number of directory servers may be configured and then linked to applications with an index order.
A typical deployment may be similar to the following:
When an application needs to authenticate or validate a security request, the application will make a simple API call to the Crowd framework, which will then map the call to the appropriate directory store. Crowd supports popular directory servers such as Microsoft Active Directory, Apple Open Directory, Sun ONE and OpenLDAP. Custom directory connectors may be developed using the Crowd integration API.
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