Service Management

The CAS service management facility allows CAS server administrators to declare and configure which services (CAS clients) may make use of CAS in which ways. The core component of the service management facility is the service registry that stores one or more registered services containing metadata that drives a number of CAS behaviors:

Authorized services - Control which services may participate in a CAS SSO session.
Forced authentication - Provides administrative control for forced authentication.
Attribute release - Provide user details to services for authorization and personalization.
Proxy control - Further restrict authorized services by granting/denying proxy authentication capability.
Theme control - Define alternate CAS themes to be used for particular services.

The following settings and properties are available from the CAS configuration catalog:

_{The configuration settings listed below are tagged as Required in the CAS configuration metadata. This flag indicates that the presence of the setting may be needed to activate or affect the behavior of the CAS feature and generally should be reviewed, possibly owned and adjusted. If the setting is assigned a default value, you do not need to strictly put the setting in your copy of the configuration, but should review it nonetheless to make sure it matches your deployment expectations.}

_{The configuration settings listed below are tagged as Optional in the CAS configuration metadata. This
flag indicates that the presence of the setting
is not immediately necessary in the end-user CAS configuration, because a default value is assigned or
the activation of the feature is not conditionally controlled by the setting value. You should only include this field in your
configuration if you need to modify the default value.}

Configuration Metadata

The collection of configuration properties listed in this section are automatically generated from the CAS source and components that contain the actual field definitions, types, descriptions, modules, etc. This metadata may not always be 100% accurate, or could be lacking details and sufficient explanations.

Be Selective

This section is meant as a guide only. Do NOT copy/paste the entire collection of settings into your CAS configuration; rather pick only the properties that you need. Do NOT enable settings unless you are certain of their purpose and do NOT copy settings into your configuration only to keep them as reference. All these ideas lead to upgrade headaches, maintenance nightmares and premature aging.

YAGNI

Note that for nearly ALL use cases, declaring and configuring properties listed here is sufficient. You should NOT have to explicitly massage a CAS XML/Java/etc configuration file to design an authentication handler, create attribute release policies, etc. CAS at runtime will auto-configure all required changes for you. If you are unsure about the meaning of a given CAS setting, do NOT turn it on without hesitation. Review the codebase or better yet, ask questions to clarify the intended behavior.

Naming Convention

Property names can be specified in very relaxed terms. For instance cas.someProperty, cas.some-property, cas.some_property are all valid names. While all forms are accepted by CAS, there are certain components (in CAS and other frameworks used) whose activation at runtime is conditional on a property value, where this property is required to have been specified in CAS configuration using kebab case. This is both true for properties that are owned by CAS as well as those that might be presented to the system via an external library or framework such as Spring Boot, etc.

When possible, properties should be stored in lower-case kebab format, such as cas.property-name=value. The only possible exception to this rule is when naming actuator endpoints; The name of the actuator endpoints (i.e. ssoSessions) MUST remain in camelCase mode.

Settings and properties that are controlled by the CAS platform directly always begin with the prefix cas. All other settings are controlled and provided to CAS via other underlying frameworks and may have their own schemas and syntax. BE CAREFUL with the distinction. Unrecognized properties are rejected by CAS and/or frameworks upon which CAS depends. This means if you somehow misspell a property definition or fail to adhere to the dot-notation syntax and such, your setting is entirely refused by CAS and likely the feature it controls will never be activated in the way you intend.

Validation

Configuration properties are automatically validated on CAS startup to report issues with configuration binding, specially if defined CAS settings cannot be recognized or validated by the configuration schema. The validation process is on by default and can be skipped on startup using a special system property SKIP_CONFIG_VALIDATION that should be set to true. Additional validation processes are also handled via Configuration Metadata and property migrations applied automatically on startup by Spring Boot and family.

Indexed Settings

CAS settings able to accept multiple values are typically documented with an index, such as cas.some.setting[0]=value. The index [0] is meant to be incremented by the adopter to allow for distinct multiple configuration blocks.

Caching Services

CAS service definitions that are loaded from service registries are cached with a expire-after-write expiration policy. Such definition are automatically expired and removed from the cache, unless forcefully removed with an explicit reload operation. In particular, you want to make sure the cache expiration policy and period does not conflict with reload operations and schedules. For example, misconfiguration can lead to scenarios where the cache might be running empty while the scheduler is running a few minutes/seconds late. With an empty cache, authentication requests from applications might not be immediately authorized util the scheduled loader has had a chance to re-populate and reconstruct the cache.

The following settings and properties are available from the CAS configuration catalog:

Configuration Metadata

Be Selective

YAGNI

Naming Convention

Validation

Indexed Settings

Scheduler Loader

CAS can be configured to load service definitions from connected sources and service registries on a schedule. Service definitions are loaded as background-running job, and the operation forces CAS to flush and invalidate cached version of service definitions and start anew.

The following settings and properties are available from the CAS configuration catalog:

Configuration Metadata

Be Selective

YAGNI

Naming Convention

Validation

Indexed Settings

Actuator Endpoints

The following endpoints are provided by CAS:

Service Management Web Application

The service management webapp is a standalone web application that may be deployed along side CAS that provides a GUI to manage service registry data. The management web application MUST share the same registry configuration as the CAS server itself so the entire system can load the same services data. To learn more about the management webapp, please see this guide.

Registered Services

Registered services present the following metadata:

Field	Description
`id`	Required unique identifier. This MUST be a valid numeric value.
`name`	Required name (`255` characters or less).
`description`	Optional free-text description of the service. (`255` characters or less)
`informationUrl`	Optional free-text link to the service information guide.
`privacyUrl`	Optional free-text link to the service privacy policy.
`redirectUrl`	Optional URL to use when returning an authentication response back to applications.
`logo`	Optional path to an image file that is the logo for this service. The image will be displayed on the login page along with the service description and name. The value may be a relative path to the `images` directory of the CAS web application or it may be a full URL.
`serviceId`	Required regular expression describing a logical service. A logical service defines one or more URLs where a service or services are located. The definition of the url pattern must be done carefully because it can open security breaches.
`theme`	Optional theme name that may be used to customize the CAS UI when the service requests a ticket. Values can use the Spring Expression Language syntax. See this guide for more details.
`proxyPolicy`	Determines whether the service is able to proxy authentication. See this guide for more info.
`evaluationOrder`	Determines relative order of evaluation of registered services. This flag is particularly important in cases where two service URL expressions cover the same services; evaluation order determines which registration is evaluated first and acts as an internal sorting factor.
`authenticationPolicy`	The authentication policy to act as a complement or override for the global authentication engine. See this guide for more details.
`attributeReleasePolicy`	The policy that describes the set of attributes allows to be released to the application, as well as any other filtering logic needed to weed some out. See this guide for more details on attribute release and filters.
`logoutType`	Defines how this service should be treated once the logout protocol is initiated. Acceptable values are `LogoutType.BACK_CHANNEL`, `LogoutType.FRONT_CHANNEL` or `LogoutType.NONE`. See this guide for more details on logout.
`responseType`	Defines how CAS should respond to requests for this service. See this guide for more details.
`usernameAttributeProvider`	The provider configuration which dictates what value as the “username” should be sent back to the application. See this guide for more details on attribute release and filters.
`accessStrategy`	The strategy configuration that outlines and access rules for this service. It describes whether the service is allowed, authorized to participate in SSO, or can be granted access from the CAS perspective based on a particular attribute-defined role, aka RBAC. See this guide for more details on attribute release and filters.
`publicKey`	The public key associated with this service that is used to authorize the request by encrypting certain elements and attributes in the CAS validation protocol response, such as the PGT or the credential. See this guide for more details on attribute release and filters.
`logoutUrl`	URL endpoint for this service to receive logout requests. See this guide for more details
`properties`	Extra metadata associated with this service in form of key/value pairs. This is used to inject custom fields into the service definition, to be used later by extension modules to define additional behavior on a per-service basis. See this guide for more info please.
`multifactorPolicy`	The policy that describes the configuration required for this service authentication, typically for multifactor authentication.
`contacts`	Specify the collection of contacts associated with service that own the application. See this guide for more info.
`matchingStrategy`	Specify the strategy used to match the service definition against an authentication request. See this guide for more info.

Service Types

Note that while the above properties apply to all generic service definitions, there are additional service types in CAS that may be activated and required depending on the protocol used and the nature of the client application. Always check the dedicated guide for the capability you have in mind (i.e. OAuth, SAML, etc).

Service Access Strategy

See this guide for more info.

Proxy Authentication Policy

See this guide for more info.

Required Authentication

See this guide for more details.

Tags & Properties

See this guide for more info.

Contacts & Owners

See this guide for more info.

Expiration Policy

See this guide for more info.

Matching Strategy

See this guide for more info.

Storage

The following options may be used to store services in CAS.

Storage	Description	Usage
Memory	See this guide.	Store service definitions XML stored in memory. Changes require CAS repackaging and server restarts
JSON	See this guide.	Store service definitions in flat JSON files. HA deployments require replication of service definitions.
YAML	See this guide.	Same as `JSON`.
GIT	See this guide.	Store service definitions in Git repository. Candidate for HA deployments.
MongoDb	See this guide.	Store service definitions in MongoDb. Candidate for HA deployments.
Redis	See this guide.	Store service definitions in Redis. Candidate for HA deployments.
LDAP	See this guide.	Store service definitions in a directory server. Candidate for HA deployments.
JPA	See this guide.	Store service definitions in a relational database (Oracle, MySQL, etc). Candidate for HA deployments.
Couchbase	See this guide.	Store service definitions in Couchbase. Candidate for HA deployments.
Couchbase	See this guide.	Store service definitions in CouchDb. Candidate for HA deployments.
DynamoDb	See this guide.	Store service definitions in DynamoDb. Candidate for HA deployments.
Amazon S3	See this guide.	Store service definitions in Amazon S3 buckets. Candidate for HA deployments.
CosmosDb	See this guide.	Store service definitions in an Azure CosmosDb. Candidate for HA deployments.
Cassandra	See this guide.	Store service definitions in an Apache Cassandra. Candidate for HA deployments.
REST	See this guide.	Design your own service registry implementation as a REST API. Candidate for HA deployments.
Custom	See this guide.	Design your own service registry using CAS APIs as an extension. Candidate for HA deployments.

How Do I Choose?

There are is a wide range of service registries on the menu. The selection criteria is outlined below:

Choose a technology that you are most familiar with and have the skills and patience to troubleshoot, tune and scale for the win.
Choose a technology that does not force your CAS configuration to be tied to any individual servers/nodes in the cluster, as this will present auto-scaling issues and manual effort.
Choose a technology that works well with your network and firewall configuration and is performant and reliable enough based on your network topology.
Choose a technology that shows promising results under your expected load, having run performance and stress tests.
Choose a technology that does not depend on outside processes, systems and manual work as much as possible, is self-reliant and self contained.