CAS Service Flow

The Central Authentication Service (CAS) is designed as a standalone Web application. It is currently implemented as several Java servlets and runs through the HTTPS server on netid.tamu.edu. It is accessed through three URLs described below: the login URL, validation URL, and optional logout URL. The following diagram depicts the data flow as a customer tries to reference a protected page.

Image from CAS 1 Architecture

The Texas A&M deployment of CAS follows this same flow. The only change for our deployment is in the response made to the validate request. The parameters returned in the response list include both the NetID and UIN. This was done to allow developers to use the UIN as a permanent key for databases or to do additional authorization checking in their applications.