Ticket Expiration Policies

CAS supports a pluggable and extensible policy framework to control the expiration policy of ticket-granting tickets (TGT), proxy-granting tickets (PGT), service tickets (ST) and proxy tickets (PT).

There Is More

There are many other types of artifacts in CAS that take the base form of a ticket abstraction. Each protocol or feature may introduce a new ticket type that carries its own expiration policy and you will need to consult the documentation for that feature or behavior to realize how expiration policies for its own ticket types may be tuned and controlled.

Ticket-Granting Ticket Policies

TGT expiration policy governs the time span during which an authenticated user may grant STs with a valid (non-expired) TGT without having to re-authenticate. An attempt to grant an ST with an expired TGT would require the user to re-authenticate to obtain a new (valid) TGT.

Default

This is the default option, which provides a hard-time out as well as a sliding window.

To see the relevant list of CAS properties, please review this guide.

Timeout

The expiration policy applied to TGTs provides for most-recently-used expiration policy, similar to a Web server session timeout. For example, a 2-hour time span with this policy in effect would require a TGT to be used every 2 hours or less, otherwise it would be marked as expired.

To see the relevant list of CAS properties, please review this guide.

Hard Timeout

The hard timeout policy provides for finite ticket lifetime as measured from the time of creation. For example, a 4-hour time span for this policy means that a ticket created at 1PM may be used up until 5PM; subsequent attempts to use it will mark it expired and the user will be forced to re-authenticate.

To see the relevant list of CAS properties, please review this guide.

Throttled

The throttled timeout policy extends the TimeoutExpirationPolicy with the concept of throttling where a ticket may be used at most every N seconds. This policy was designed to thwart denial of service conditions where a rogue or misconfigured client attempts to consume CAS server resources by requesting high volumes of service tickets in a short time.

To see the relevant list of CAS properties, please review this guide.

Never

The never expires policy allows tickets to exist indefinitely.

Usage Warning!

Use of this policy has significant consequences to overall security policy and should be enabled only after a thorough review by a qualified security team. There are also implications to server resource usage for the ticket registries backed by filesystem storage. Since disk storage for tickets can never be reclaimed for those registries with this policy in effect, use of this policy with those ticket registry implementations is strongly discouraged.

Service Ticket Policies

ST expiration policy governs the time span during which an authenticated user may attempt to validate an ST.

Default

This is the default policy applied to service tickets where a ticket is expired after a fixed number of uses or after a maximum period of inactivity elapses.

To see the relevant list of CAS properties, please review this guide.

Per Service

The expiration policy of service tickets can be conditionally decided on a per-application basis. The candidate service whose service ticket expiration policy is to deviate from the default configuration must be designed as such:

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{
    "@class" : "org.apereo.cas.services.RegexRegisteredService",
    "serviceId" : "^https://.*",
    "name" : "Sample",
    "id" : 10,
    "serviceTicketExpirationPolicy": {
      "@class": "org.apereo.cas.services.DefaultRegisteredServiceServiceTicketExpirationPolicy",
      "numberOfUses": 1,
      "timeToLive": "10"
    }
}

Proxy Ticket Policies

PT expiration policy governs the time span during which an authenticated user may attempt to validate an PT.

Default

This is the default policy applied to proxy tickets where a ticket is expired after a fixed number of uses or after a maximum period of inactivity elapses.

To see the relevant list of CAS properties, please review this guide.

Per Service

The expiration policy of proxy tickets can be conditionally decided on a per-application basis. The candidate service whose proxy ticket expiration policy is to deviate from the default configuration must be designed as such:

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{
    "@class" : "org.apereo.cas.services.RegexRegisteredService",
    "serviceId" : "^https://.*",
    "name" : "Sample",
    "id" : 10,
    "proxyTicketExpirationPolicy": {
     "@class": "org.apereo.cas.services.DefaultRegisteredServiceProxyTicketExpirationPolicy",
     "numberOfUses": 1,
     "timeToLive": "30"
    } 
}

Proxy-Granting Ticket Policies

PGT expiration policy governs the time span during which CAS may grant PTs with a valid (non-expired) PGT.

Default

By default, the expiration policy assigned to proxy-granting tickets is controlled by the same policy assigned to ticket-granting tickets.

Per Service

The expiration policy of proxy granting tickets can be conditionally decided on a per-application basis. The candidate service whose proxy granting ticket expiration policy is to deviate from the default configuration must be designed as such:

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{
    "@class" : "org.apereo.cas.services.RegexRegisteredService",
    "serviceId" : "^https://.*",
    "name" : "Sample",
    "id" : 10,
    "proxyGrantingTicketExpirationPolicy": {
     "@class": "org.apereo.cas.services.DefaultRegisteredServiceProxyGrantingTicketExpirationPolicy",
     "maxTimeToLiveInSeconds": 30
    } 
}

To see the relevant list of CAS properties, please review this guide.