The Janssen Project Takes on World’s Most Demanding Digital Trust Challenges at Linux Foundation

New Janssen Project seeks to build the world’s fastest and most comprehensive cloud native identity and access management software platform

San Francisco, Calif., December 8, 2020 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the Janssen Project, a cloud native identity and access management software platform that prioritizes security and performance for our digital society. Janssen is based on the Gluu Server and benefits from a rich set of signing and encryption functionalities. Engineers from IDEMIA, F5, BioID, Couchbase and Gluu will make up the Technical Steering Committee.

Online trust is a fundamental challenge to our digital society. The Internet has connected us. But at the same time, it has undermined trust. Digital identity starts with a connection between a person and a digital device. Identity software conveys the integrity of that connection from the user’s device to a complex web of backend services. Solving the challenge of digital identity is foundational to achieving trustworthy online security.

While other identity and access management platforms exist, the Janssen Project seeks to tackle the most challenging security and performance requirements. Based on the latest code that powers the Gluu Server–which has passed more OpenID self-certification tests then any other platform–Janssen starts with a rich set of signing and encryption functionality that can be used for high assurance transactions. Having shown throughput of more than one billion authentications per day, the software can also handle the most demanding requirements for concurrency thanks to Kubernetes auto-scaling and advances in persistence.

“Trust and security are not competitive advantages–no one wins in an insecure society with low trust,” said Mike Schwartz, Chair of the Janssen Project Technical Steering Committee. “In the world of software, nothing builds trust like the open source development methodology. For organizations who cannot outsource trust, the Janssen Project strives to bring transparency, best practices and collective governance to the long term maintenance of this important effort. The Linux Foundation provides the neutral and proven forum for organizations to collaborate on this work.”

The Gluu engineering teams chose the Linux Foundation to host this community because of the Foundation’s priority of transparency in the development process and its formal framework for governance to facilitate collaboration among commercial partners.

New digital identity challenges arise constantly, and new standards are developed to address them.  Open source ecosystems are an engine for innovation to filter and adapt to changing requirements. The Janssen Project Technical Steering Committee (“TSC”) will help govern priorities according to the charter.  The initial TSC includes:

For more information, see the project Github site: https://github.com/JanssenProject

Supporting Comments

BioID

“BioID’s biometric authentication service provides GDPR compliant, device independent, 3D liveness detection and facial recognition APIs, supported out-of-the-box by the Janssen project. Exposing BioID’s capabilities via OpenID Connect makes sense in many cases, especially as part of the rollout for a large organization.  The availability of a high quality open source implementation of OpenID Connect gives us more options to build products and to expand the options for our customers to deploy our technology,” said Alexander Werner, Software Engineer at BioID.

Couchbase

“The Couchbase database is supported today in the Janssen project for both caching and persistence. This makes sense given the distributed, elastic, in-memory requirements for a multi-cloud, hyper-scale identity service. Contributing to this project aligns with our goal to advance open source infrastructure software that results in more options for the Couchbase community,” said Ian McCloy, Principal Product Manager at Couchbase.

F5

“It’s an immense pleasure to join the Janssen Project, as it’s aimed to improve the performance, reliability and security on OAuth2 Components that are similar to NGINX Principles. Being part of Linux Foundation, the Janssen Project will be well governed and evolve with the open source community to achieve its goals,” said Rajesh Bavanantham, F5.

IDEMIA

“I have been a part of the Gluu community for many years. I’m excited to see the project moving to the Linux Foundation where we can collaborate with an even larger ecosystem of individuals and companies,” said Will Cayo, IDEMIA.

About the Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,500 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more.  The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

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