WORKERS AHEAD!

You are viewing the development documentation for the Apereo CAS server. The functionality presented here is not officially released yet. This is a work in progress and will be continually updated as development moves forward. You are most encouraged to test the changes presented.

To view the documentation for a specific Apereo CAS server release, please choose an appropriate version. The release schedule is available here.

Authentication Interrupt

CAS has the ability to pause and interrupt the authentication flow to reach out to external services and resources, querying for status and settings that would then dictate how CAS should manage and control the SSO session. Interrupt services are able to present notification messages to the user, provide options for redirects to external services, etc. A common use case deals with presenting a bulletin board during the authentication flow to present messages and announcements to select users and then optionally require the audience to complete a certain task before CAS is able to honor the authentication request and establish a session.

In the interrupt flow, CAS is not at the moment reaching back to an external resource acting as an interrupt service to store, track or remember a user’s decision. In other words, we are only dealing with the R (ie. Read) in CRUD. Today’s functionality only deals with inquiring status and reading results solely in read-only mode. Interrupt services are themselves required and encouraged to redirect the audience to external resources where execution of an action resets the interrupt status thereby freeing CAS to proceed forward later on without having to interrupt the authentication flow again.

Configuration

Support is enabled by including the following dependency in the WAR overlay:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.apereo.cas</groupId>
  <artifactId>cas-server-support-interrupt-webflow</artifactId>
  <version>${cas.version}</version>
</dependency>

implementation "org.apereo.cas:cas-server-support-interrupt-webflow:${project.'cas.version'}"

dependencyManagement {
  imports {
    mavenBom "org.apereo.cas:cas-server-support-bom:${project.'cas.version'}"
  }
}

dependencies {  
  implementation "org.apereo.cas:cas-server-support-interrupt-webflow"
}

The following settings and properties are available from the CAS configuration catalog:

_{The configuration settings listed below are tagged as Required in the CAS configuration metadata. This flag indicates that the presence of the setting may be needed to activate or affect the behavior of the CAS feature and generally should be reviewed, possibly owned and adjusted. If the setting is assigned a default value, you do not need to strictly put the setting in your copy of the configuration, but should review it nonetheless to make sure it matches your deployment expectations.}

_{The configuration settings listed below are tagged as Optional in the CAS configuration metadata. This flag indicates that the presence of the setting is not immediately necessary in the end-user CAS configuration, because a default value is assigned or the activation of the feature is not conditionally controlled by the setting value.}

cas.interrupt.core.force-execution=false

Whether execution of the interrupt inquiry query should be always forced, and the status of interrupt check should be ignored. This is a global setting that can optionally be overruled for each application policy.

org.apereo.cas.configuration.model.support.interrupt.InterruptCoreProperties.

cas.interrupt.core.trigger-mode=AFTER_AUTHENTICATION

Define how interrupt notifications should be triggered in the authentication flow. Available values are as follows:

AFTER_AUTHENTICATION: Trigger interrupt notifications and inquiry after authentication events and before single sign-on has been established.
AFTER_SSO: Trigger interrupt notifications and inquiry after single sign-on has been established. Interrupt queries that execute after single sign-on cannot control the creation of the SSO session conditionally.

org.apereo.cas.configuration.model.support.interrupt.InterruptCoreProperties.

Configuration Metadata

The collection of configuration properties listed in this section are automatically generated from the CAS source and components that contain the actual field definitions, types, descriptions, modules, etc. This metadata may not always be 100% accurate, or could be lacking details and sufficient explanations.

Be Selective

This section is meant as a guide only. Do NOT copy/paste the entire collection of settings into your CAS configuration; rather pick only the properties that you need. Do NOT enable settings unless you are certain of their purpose and do NOT copy settings into your configuration only to keep them as reference. All these ideas lead to upgrade headaches, maintenance nightmares and premature aging.

YAGNI

Note that for nearly ALL use cases, declaring and configuring properties listed here is sufficient. You should NOT have to explicitly massage a CAS XML/Java/etc configuration file to design an authentication handler, create attribute release policies, etc. CAS at runtime will auto-configure all required changes for you. If you are unsure about the meaning of a given CAS setting, do NOT turn it on without hesitation. Review the codebase or better yet, ask questions to clarify the intended behavior.

Naming Convention

Property names can be specified in very relaxed terms. For instance cas.someProperty, cas.some-property, cas.some_property are all valid names. While all forms are accepted by CAS, there are certain components (in CAS and other frameworks used) whose activation at runtime is conditional on a property value, where this property is required to have been specified in CAS configuration using kebab case. This is both true for properties that are owned by CAS as well as those that might be presented to the system via an external library or framework such as Spring Boot, etc. When possible, properties should be stored in lower-case kebab format, such as cas.property-name=value.S ettings and properties that are controlled by the CAS platform directly always begin with the prefix cas. All other settings are controlled and provided to CAS via other underlying frameworks and may have their own schemas and syntax. BE CAREFUL with the distinction. Unrecognized properties are rejected by CAS and/or frameworks upon which CAS depends. This means if you somehow misspell a property definition or fail to adhere to the dot-notation syntax and such, your setting is entirely refused by CAS and likely the feature it controls will never be activated in the way you intend.

Validation

Configuration properties are automatically validated on CAS startup to report issues with configuration binding, specially if defined CAS settings cannot be recognized or validated by the configuration schema. The validation process is on by default and can be skipped on startup using a special system property SKIP_CONFIG_VALIDATION that should be set to true. Additional validation processes are also handled via Configuration Metadata and property migrations applied automatically on startup by Spring Boot and family.

Indexed Settings

CAS settings able to accept multiple values are typically documented with an index, such as cas.some.setting[0]=value. The index [0] is meant to be incremented by the adopter to allow for distinct multiple configuration blocks.

Tracking Interrupts

The execution of the interrupt inquiry is tracked and remembered as a dedicated CAS cookie and under a specific authentication attribute. The calculation of the inquiry trigger would take into account both options, depending on whether interrupt is set to trigger after authentication or single sign-on.

The following settings and properties are available from the CAS configuration catalog: