Think Relevance
U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL)
U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL)
"We approached Relevance for their Ruby and Rails security expertise, but it quickly became clear that their value extended to business analysis, project management, accurate estimation, and quality code. Relevance knows what it takes to succeed in software development, and they deliver."
—Phyllis Jenket, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory
About the Project
The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) engaged Relevance for a Rails Audit in preparation for the release of a security-critical application. Impressed with the rigor of the audit and the value of the findings, NRL enlisted Relevance’s consulting services to guide NRL’s development staff in the resolution of the issues identified during the audit.
Following the success of this first project, NRL partnered with Relevance to establish a Central Authentication Service (CAS) to provide centralized and secure authentication for accessing a mission-based collaboration site used by teams spread throughout the world. To meet this need, Relevance developed and released < href="http://blog.thinkrelevance.com/2008/10/28/castronaut-sso-the-big-unit-and-a-fedora" target="_blank">Castronaut. Castronaut is an open source, Ruby-based CAS server, supporting centralized authentication, single sign-on, and pass-through service authentication. Castronaut provides the secure and centralized authentication NRL was looking for, and it benefits the software development community at large. NRL now benefits from the open-source community, which freely contributes enhancements to the Castronaut codebase.
Relevant Solutions
- Comprehensive Rails Audit identifying process, coding and security issues, and outlining appropriate fixes
- Mentorship for NRL’s development staff, providing the Ruby and Ruby on Rails expertise needed to achieve the production release
- Development of the Ruby community’s first well-tested and robust open source CAS server