About CAS

Enterprise Single Sign-on

CAS provides a friendly open source community that actively supports and contributes to the project. While the project is rooted in higher-ed open source, it has grown to an international audience spanning Fortune 500 companies and small special-purpose installations.

What is Single sign-on?

Single sign on is a session/user authentication process that allows a user to provide his or her credentials once in order to access multiple applications. The single sign on authenticates the user to access all the applications he or she has been authorized to access. It eliminates future authenticaton requests when the user switches applications during that particular session.

Web Single sign on works strictly with applications accessed with a web browser. The request to access a web resource is intercepted either by a component in the web server, or by the application itself. Unauthenticated users are diverted to an authenticaton service and returned only after a successful authentication.

 

Sources:

  1. http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid14_gci340859,00.html
  2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_sign-on