Build and Implement A Single Sign-On Solution

By Chris Dunne
2004-01-28


Integrate an open source, Java-based authentication component into a Web portal
Through my own work I have seen the growth in demand for a variety of portal applications. Portals are becoming more and more sophisticated, with complex technical and functional requirements. Even though the tools are available to build simple portals, the issues of integrating them with remote or legacy data sources are not trivial. One such issue is authentication.

Authentication is a complex problem. Portals need to authenticate users to back-end data sources and applications, yet these applications may each have different underlying security infrastructures. And the ideal and most efficient authentication solution is a single sign-on one, or SSO, in which the user only has to log in once and is authenticated to all of the network resources.

Recently, when I was asked to build an educational portal that required SSO, I researched a number of commercial and open source SSO solutions. In this article, I'll walk through a step-by-step process for implementing a simple SSO system using a freely available implementation called CAS from Yale University.

Tutorial Pages:
» Integrate an open source, Java-based authentication component into a Web portal
» Why choose single sign-on?
» SSO open source projects
» A brief overview of CAS
» Getting started with CAS
» Active Directory Server authentication
» Single sign-off
» Resources


First published by IBM developerWorks

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