Arjan Tijms' Weblog

Basic access authentication is a crude mechanism to authenticate that's part of the HTTP standard. It allows both an agent to send username/password credentials and a server to request the agent to authenticate itself. This happens in a simple but standardized way. The mechanism can be easily implemented using Java EE's JASPIC and a sprinkle of utility code from the experimental OmniSecurity project (which is currently being discussed as one of the possible options to simplify security in Java EE 8). A basic implementation looks as follows: public class BasicAuthModule extends HttpServerAuthModule { @Override public AuthStatus validateHttpRequest(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response, HttpMsgContext httpMsgContext) throws AuthException { String[] credentials = getCredentials(request); if (!isEmpty(credentials)) { UsernamePasswordIdentityStore identityStore = getReferenceOrNull(UsernamePa...

Undertow's native security system has an incredible useful feature that's painfully missing in the security system of Java EE; authentication events . While Java EE applications could directly use the Undertow events, it's not directly clear how to do this. Furthermore having Undertow specific dependencies sprinkled throughout the code of an otherwise general Java EE application is perhaps not entirely optimal. The following code shows how the Undertow dependencies can be centralized to a single drop-in jar, by creating an Undertow extension (handler) that bridges the native Undertow events to standard CDI ones. Upon adding such jar to a Java EE application, the application code only has to know about general CDI events. First create the handler itself: import io.undertow.security.api.NotificationReceiver; import io.undertow.security.api.SecurityNotification; import io.undertow.server.HttpHandler; import io.undertow.server.HttpServerExchange; import javax.enterpris...