availability of clear-text password proxying for CAS

[Peter Kharchenko]

Dear members of the CAS community,

We would like to announce availability of a CAS extension that allows to 
proxy clear-text passwords to select services. These extensions were 
designed for Sacramento State and they are making it available to the 
rest of the community.

While enabling single sign-on through standard CAS protocols is 
certainly the preferred approach, some third-party applications can not 
be modified to accommodate such workflow, and require an actual password 
to be provided to them. The developed ClearPass extension provides a 
secure way to hand-off the clear-text password information to a limited 
set of CAS-enabled applications, so that the password can be utilized 
for authentication with a downstream legacy service. This allows, for 
instance, to enable single sign-on of uPortal users into a MS Exchange 
server that would not be able to process CAS proxy tickets.

The implementation is described on the JA-SIG wiki 
(http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/x/BIDc), and the code is available in the 
JA-SIG SVN repository.

thank you,
-peter.