Massively Multiplayer Open Source Authentication
In which I note Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft's historical use of the Jasig Central Authentication Service and Sony's current use of CAS.
Besides providing simple, secure, extensible Web single sign on at many colleges and universities, Jasig's Central Authentication Service is also the basis for the current web login to Sony's FreeRealms massively multiplayer online role playing game. With over two million players as of May 2009, this may be the largest userbase deployment of CAS in the world.
Blizzard Entertainment used CAS in the past for Web authentication to the ancillary services (forums, account management) for their immensely popular World of Warcraft massively multiplayer online role playing game. I don't know whether Blizzard continues to use CAS today, but the login form looks CAS-inspired but not-actually-CAS to my eyes.
It looks like the new "Year 600" massively multiplayer online role playing game is using CAS.
Personally, I think it's pretty cool to to see CAS used at massive scale, for these massively multiplayer online games. For serious needs like those of financial services firms. And even for really serious needs like access to crisis consulting resources. For practical needs like logging in to a magazine publisher's website and a webmail provider. And at all sorts of places, including the deployments registered on Jasig's website.
Your Blogmaster:
Andrew Petro
After graduating with a degree in Computer Science from Yale University in 2004, Andrew stayed on to serve his alma mater as a casual systems programmer with the Technology & Planning group. His interests include automated software testing, application frameworks, and electronic security. Projects in which Andrew has been involved include the Central Authentication Service, YaleInfo Portal (Yale's uPortal implementation), the Jasig uPortal project, and the Jasig CAS project. Andrew has previously served on the Jasig uPortal and CAS steering committees, has been the release engineer for uPortal, and has been published in the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery on the topic of electronic voting. In spring 2006 Andrew joined Unicon full time, serving various roles, including now as the Cooperative Support for CAS technical lead.
