Introducing the Central Authentication Service

CAS is an open source, single sign-on server, providing centralized access control, and authentication to web-based resources within an organization. The benefits of CAS are numerous to administrators, and it supports many applications and diverse user communities. The benefits are as follows:

• Individual or group access to resources (applications) can be configured in one location
• Broad support for a wide variety of authentication stores (to centralize user management) provides a single point of authentication and control to a widespread, cross-machine environment
• Wide authentication support is provided for web-based and non-web-based Java applications through CAS client libraries
• A single point of reference for user credentials (via CAS) is provided so that CAS client applications are not required to have any knowledge of the user's credentials, or knowledge of how to verify them

In this chapter, we'll not focus much on the management of CAS, but...