The Central Authentication Service (CAS) may be one of the most important infrastructural services that you may not be aware but are relying on every day. Based on an open-source technology that is widely adopted in the higher-education sector, CAS is a single sign-on service that allows you to access multiple secure web applications by just logging in once. For instance, the internal campus portal, namely myPortal, is using CAS for user authentication.

Recently, there are some important infrastructural changes with CAS. The new CAS supports newer browsers such as Chrome, Safari, etc. and allows more sophisticated authentication arrangements. Behind the scene, the new CAS is supported by a cluster of servers which means it is more robust and resilient to server failure. For web developers, the new CAS supports the retrieval of user’s attributes by their web applications. This enables the backend web applications to determine the proper access control rights of an authenticated user. For more details about the new CAS, please visit:

http://www.ust.hk/itsc/cas

Last but not least, please note that the new CAS has got a slightly modified new face.