Research And Implementation Of Central Authentication Platform Based On Ja-sig CAS

With the rapid development of internet, more and more web applications are used as the infrastructure of many organizations to support their everyday work. However, because new systems which have their own user management and authentication subsystems are constantly introduced into large organizations such as schools, governments and business firms, managing users from different systems in one organization becomes more and more difficult. Besides, without a central authentication solution the end-users of such systems will have to register and login multiple times if they want to use different services provided by the same organization, which is inconvenient and confusing. This thesis attempt to provide a reliable central user authentication mechanism for such large organization to manage user information, including usernames, passwords and other attributes shared among applications, in a one place.The thesis starts with the research of popular single sign-on solutions and the comparisons of different solutions. After that, the database design and overall system architecture of the central authentication of platform is proposed based upon the analysis of system requirements. Afterwards, the CAS protocol and detailed design of central authentication platform based on JA-SIG CAS is explained. Following that, the application integration plan is introduced with two examples of real systems. Also for organizations that have critical requirements for the performance of their systems, high performance architecture of the central authentication platform is discussed. Finally, the insufficiencies of the system are summarized and the aspects for the improvement of the system are proposed for further research.The central authentication platform based on JA-SIG CAS is expected to be a complete and optimized central authentication and user management system that can be integrated easily with applications running on multiple operating systems.