Idea: Integrate JA-SIG Central Authentication Service

[bigheadfish]

About JA-SIG Central Authentication Service

JA-SIG Central Authentication Service (CAS) is an open source authentication system originally created by Yale University. 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. It is the most popular single sign-on solution for universities. For details about JA-SIG CAS, please visit http://www.ja-sig.org/products/cas/

JA-SIG CAS has been deployed by (at least) 80 universities worldwide, and the user base is over 1 million!

Project Idea

My idea is to create a CAS plug-in for Joomla! to allow single sign-on with CAS. It will allow university users to use their campus-wide ID/password to login to Joomla!.

This plug-in will do more than just single sign-on. It will integrate with Joomla!'s built in group and access control so that administrator can set access to particular user group, for example: faculty only, staff only, or students in Computer Science only, etc.

I have worked on similar projects in the past, and I know how to bypass (integrate) Joomla!'s authentication and authorization process.

Thank you for your time,

Minghui Yu (4th year CS student in University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada)
http://www.ugrad.cs.ubc.ca/~s3p5/

[pasamio]

Would this include Shibboleth integration?

[bigheadfish]

Would this include Shibboleth integration?

No plan at this time. However, I think both CAS and Shibboleth run in a similar way (know little about Shibboleth, just my guess). So the integration shall be similar too.

[bigheadfish]

If I an enrolled in GSoC, I will build a module that provide the following Central Authentication Service/Single Sign-on

(listed by implementation order)

1. JA-SIG
2.Shibboleth

3. (any of)
Windows LiveID
Open ID

4. Campus Wide Login (It is only used in my university so I put it the last one in my list)

[pasamio]

With regards to 3, OpenID is already an option for 1.5 so there would be no real reason to do it for SoC. Personally I'd figure Shibboleth as slightly more important as there are more providers for it, though JA-SIG CAS is a start towards that (I believe it can be used as the basis for a Shibboleth federation as the IDP part).

Some useful reading:
http://www.switch.ch/aai/docs/shibboleth/SWITCH/1.3/

[bigheadfish]

With regards to 3, OpenID is already an option for 1.5 so there would be no real reason to do it for SoC. Personally I'd figure Shibboleth as slightly more important as there are more providers for it, though JA-SIG CAS is a start towards that (I believe it can be used as the basis for a Shibboleth federation as the IDP part).

Some useful reading:
http://www.switch.ch/aai/docs/shibboleth/SWITCH/1.3/

Thanks Sam. I really appreciate your feedback.

Minghui

[pasamio]

By the way, I haven't seen an application from you, http://code.google.com/soc/

[piqueren]

I would like to help you to do this project.
I am using the JA-SIG CAS (Central Authentication Service) on the intranet of my school, and we would like to use it for joomla, that will be great
See you

[pasamio]

If you're interested in working on getting JA-SIG authentication working with Joomla!, all you have to do is start work on it. It would also be preferable that you submit some documentation on how to set up a testing environment with all of the software setup as well. I'm happy outside of SoC to provide help with getting this sort of thing up and running if you are interested in doing it,

Cheers,

Sam