Attribute Consent

CAS provides the ability to enforce user-informed consent upon attribute release. Practically, this means that prior to accessing the target application, the user will be presented with a collection of attributes allowed to be released to the application with options to either proceed or deny the release of said attributes. There are also additional options to indicate how should underlying changes in the attribute release policy be considered by the consent engine. Users are also provided the ability to set up reminders in the event that no change is detected in the attribute release policy.

Consent attribute records stored in the configured repository are signed and encrypted.

Support is enabled by including the following module in the WAR Overlay:

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<dependency>
  <groupId>org.apereo.cas</groupId>
  <artifactId>cas-server-support-consent-webflow</artifactId>
  <version>${cas.version}</version>
</dependency>

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implementation "org.apereo.cas:cas-server-support-consent-webflow:${project.'cas.version'}"

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dependencyManagement {
  imports {
    mavenBom "org.apereo.cas:cas-server-support-bom:${project.'cas.version'}"
  }
}

dependencies {  
  implementation "org.apereo.cas:cas-server-support-consent-webflow"
}

Configuration

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.

Actuator Endpoints

The following endpoints are provided by CAS:


Account Profile Management

The attribute consent feature is able to provide consent decision records and information to the account profile management feature in CAS. See this guide for better details.

Attribute Selection

By default, all attributes that are marked for release do qualify for consent. To control this process, you may define a consent policy that indicates a criteria by which attribute selection for consent is carried out.

The policy assigned to each service includes the following features:

Field Description
excludedAttributes Optional. Exclude the indicated attributes from consent.
includeOnlyAttributes Optional. Force-include the indicated attributes in consent, provided attributes are resolved.
excludedServices Optional. Set of service identifiers, defined as a regular expression, for which consent should be skipped. Particularly useful if the service definition is treated as an aggregate of many other applications, allowing this to act as an inner filter.
status Controls whether consent for this service should be activated. See below for activation rules.

A sample definition follows:

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{
  "@class" : "org.apereo.cas.services.CasRegisteredService",
  "serviceId" : "sample",
  "name" : "sample",
  "id" : 100,
  "description" : "sample",
  "attributeReleasePolicy" : {
    "@class" : "org.apereo.cas.services.ReturnAllAttributeReleasePolicy",
    "consentPolicy": {
      "@class": "org.apereo.cas.services.consent.DefaultRegisteredServiceConsentPolicy",
      "excludedAttributes": ["java.util.LinkedHashSet", ["test"]],
      "includeOnlyAttributes": ["java.util.LinkedHashSet", ["test"]],
      "excludedServices": ["java.util.LinkedHashSet", ["https://example.*"]],
      "status": "FALSE"
    }
  }
}

Activation

See this guide for more details.

Storage

User consent decisions may be stored and remembered using one of the following options.

Storage Description
CouchDb See this guide.
DynamoDb See this guide.
Groovy See this guide.
JDBC See this guide.
JSON See this guide.
LDAP See this guide.
MongoDb See this guide.
Redis See this guide.
REST See this guide.
Custom See this guide.