Hi Andrew,

I'm still new to this myself, but I am using CAS now to authenticate a
chat client to OpenFire (an open source Jabber chat server). I'm finding
that proxy authentication works fine. The primary challenge for me was
getting the proxy ticket to the client so it could pass it to the
OpenFire server.

The way CAS is designed, the CAS server must call back to the
application that needs the proxy ticket to give it a ticket. In my case,
it was another client application (the chat client) which needed the
proxy ticket and not another application running in the middle tier so I
had to arrange to have the web application request and accept the proxy
ticket and then put it in the web page in a hidden field. The chat
client then retrieves the ticket from the web page and
connects/authenticates with OpenFire.

I was lucky in that OpenFire has a reasonably open architecture that
allows you to build your own authentication module. And it is written in
Java so I could use either of the available CAS Java clients to call
proxyValidate to validate the ticket and retrieve the username. The only
other issue I ran into was that although OpenFire allowed me to say
yes/no to whether the user was authenticated, it still expected that the
username passed to it be the correct one ... i.e. my module didn't get
called until after it already had the username. This is a bit of a
problem for CAS because all you have is the ticket ... you don't get the
username until after you validate the ticket. Luckily, I already knew
the username from when my original web application authenticated so I
just embedded that in the web page, too, and sent it to OpenFire along
with the proxy ticket.

I have also finished integrating CAS with ACEGI and Spring Web Services
and that is working pretty well also. In my case, the web services are
also being called from a Flex/Flash client so I had to use the same
approach (i.e. get the proxy ticket before rendering the page and
putting it in the web page where the Flex/Flash application was
embedded) to get the ticket in the hands of the application calling the
web services.

Don't know if this is the sort of feedback you were looking for, but it
is my 2 cents worth anyway.

Bill


-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Behalf Of Andrew R Feller
Sent: Friday, August 17, 2007 2:10 PM
To: Yale CAS mailing list
Cc: Christopher M Dalrymple
Subject: Proxy authentication of non-web applications

Given a mixture of web applications and offline services/EJBs/etc, what
solutions are available for CAS-ified web applications to authenticate
with offline services aside from making them a web service?

I know that CAS 2+ supports proxy authentication between services but
was curious what situations the rest of the community has experienced.
 
Thanks,
Andy

Andrew R Feller, Analyst
Subversion Administrator
University Information Systems
Louisiana State University
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(office) 225.578.3737

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