JAAS in Java EE is not the universal standard you may think it is
The Java EE security landscape is complex and fragmented. There is the original Java SE security model, there is JAAS, there is JASPIC, there is JACC and there are the various specs like Servlet, EJB and JAX-RS that each have their own sections on security. For some reason or the other it's too often thought that there's only a single all encompassing security framework in Java EE, and that the name of that framework is JAAS. This is however not the case. Far from it. Raymond K. NG has explained this a long time ago in the following articles: JAAS in the Enterprise Whatever Happened to JAAS? In short, Java EE has its own security model and over the years has tried to bridge this to the existing Java SE model, but this has never worked flawlessly. One particular issue that we'll be taking a more in-depth look at in this article concerns the JAAS Subject . The JAAS Subject represent an entity like a person and is implemented as a so-called "bag of Principa...