NEW ORLEANS - December 7, 2004 - The Java Architectures Special Interest Group (JA-SIG) is delighted to announce that Yale Central Authentication Service (CAS) is joining the growing JA-SIG family of open source solutions for higher education. CAS is a WebISO solution recognized by the Internet2 Middleware working group and is commonly deployed with uPortal to provide web single sign-on and proxy authentication.
CAS was developed in the summer of 1999 at Yale University to meet the growing need for a flexible lightweight web-centric protocol to leverage Yale's existing Kerberos-based single sign-on framework. Both flexibility and simplicity were key considerations.
"The low integration cost of adding CAS to existing middle-tier applications increased its acceptance on campus substantially. This, in turn, allowed a larger portion of the University to benefit from our single sign-on framework. Applications that use CAS for authentication, as a rule, are much easier to integrate into a portal", says Andrew Newman, ITS Director of Technology & Planning at Yale University.
"CAS is the unsung hero of many uPortal implementations. It provides the seamless experience that users expect...without CAS a portal is simply a content aggregator", says William G. Thompson, Jr., Associate Director for Enterprise Systems and Services at Rutgers University.
Yale and Rutgers will lead the development of the next generation CAS architecture which will maintain backward compatibility with the CAS 2.0 protocol while providing extension points for well known modifications and new features such as support for web services. The new design will also make it easier to provide support for evolving standards such as SAML and Shibboleth.
The JA-SIG encourages members of the community to evaluate, deploy and participate in the evolution and development of this critical open-source application. In order to facilitate community involvement, a public CVS, mail lists, wiki and bug tracking will be set up at the JA-SIG Clearinghouse.
Contacts:
Andrew Newman
Director, Technology & Planning
Yale University Information Technology Services
175 Whitney Avenue, New Haven, CT 06520
Email: newman-andy@yale.edu
Phone: (203) 432-6696 Fax: (203) 436-4067
William G. Thompson, Jr.
Associate Director, Enterprise System & Services
Rutgers University Office of Information Technology
65 Davidson Rd, Piscataway, NJ 08854
Email: wgthom@rutgers.edu
Phone: (732) 445-5428 Fax: (732) 445-5493
