Apereo’s CAS Project Awarded NLnet Grant to Advance Multitenant Authentication Innovation
The Apereo Foundation is pleased to announce that the CAS (Central Authentication Service) project has been selected to receive a grant from the NLnet Foundation, based in Europe, through its August 2025 NGI0 Commons Fund call. CAS joins 45 innovative projects chosen for their contributions to building a more open, secure, and privacy-respecting internet ecosystem.
This award will support continued development of Multitenant CAS, a scalable, enterprise-grade extension of the CAS single sign-on platform designed to support multiple tenants within a unified authentication architecture. The enhancement strengthens CAS’s ability to meet the needs of institutions serving diverse user groups, complex organizational structures, and large-scale distributed environments—advancing secure access management across education, research, and the public sector.
About the NGI0 Commons Fund
The NGI0 Commons Fund is an ambitious grant programme led by NLnet as part of the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet initiative. The fund focuses on developing and sustaining internet commons—open, trustworthy, and privacy-respecting technologies that strengthen the public nature of the internet.
Through a holistic, full-stack approach, the NGI0 Commons Fund aims to mature and scale solutions across the entire technology spectrum, from libre silicon to middleware, peer-to-peer infrastructure, and user-facing applications. Its mission is clear: reclaim the internet as a public good and enable a resilient, open technology ecosystem that empowers its users with full autonomy.
About Apereo CAS
Apereo CAS (Central Authentication Service) is an Apache 2.0-licensed, open source single sign-on system that provides secure, centralized authentication for web applications at scale. Originally developed in the early 2000s, CAS today plays a critical role in identity and access management across more than 12,000 deployments worldwide—including government agencies, NGOs, major universities, and organizations such as the European Commission’s EU Login, the Council of Europe, and the European Environment Agency.
With native clustering capabilities, a resilient architecture, and support for modern standards including SAML, OAuth, and OpenID Connect, CAS offers flexible integration with directories and identity stores, multifactor authentication, delegated authentication, and comprehensive auditing. Its popularity is reflected in its strong adoption and community engagement, including more than 11,000 GitHub stars and an active contributor base governed transparently through a Project Management Council (PMC).
CAS continues to evolve through community-driven innovation under the stewardship of the Apereo Foundation, enabling organizations worldwide to deploy secure, scalable, and sustainable identity solutions.