Q: What is MIT Touchstone?

• What is MIT Touchstone?
• What is the Touchstone authentication service?

Context

• MIT products and services
• IS&T products and services
• Web authentication at MIT

Answer

MIT Touchstone is a web authentication service for the MIT community and beyond. MIT Touchstone provides a federated authentication approach using Shibboleth in conjunction with other components. The service enables MIT users to authenticate to enabled systems both on campus and off.

What does this mean?

• MIT Touchstone provides a single portal for web authentication
• MIT Touchstone also provides a service for users to register non-MIT identities (i.e. get a password tied to your external email address to use to authenticate to some MIT services)
• MIT Touchstone makes available several ways for MIT users to authenticate:
  • Personal web certificate
  • Kerberos username and password
  • Kerberos tickets for operating systems and browsers that support it

Detailed information about Touchstone

The MIT Touchstone service page See the above MIT Touchstone service page for full information and detailed technical background on Touchstone.

Additional information

• MIT Touchstone FAQ