Arjan Tijms' Weblog

Almost exactly 3 years ago I took an initial look at custom container authentication in Java EE . Java EE has a dedicated API for this called JASPIC. Even though JASPIC was a mandatory part of Java EE, support at the time was not really good. In this article we'll take a look at where things were and how things are in the current crop of servers in 2015. To begin with, there were a number of spec omissions in JASPIC 1.0 (Java EE 6). The biggest one was that in order to register a server authentication module (SAM) an application ID had to be provided. This ID could not be obtained in a portable way. The JASPIC 1.1 MR rectified this . Other spec omissions concerned JASPIC being silent about what would need to happen with respect to HttpServletRequest#login and HttpServletRequest#logout, and with forward and includes done from a SAM. The JASPIC 1.1 MR rectified these omissions too . With respect to the actual behaviour there were a large number of very serious problems. Most ...

In Java EE security two artefacts play a major role, the authentication mechanism and the identity store . The authentication mechanism is responsible for interacting with the caller and the environment. E.g. it causes a UI to be rendered that asks for details such as a username and password, and after a postback retrieves these from the request. As such it's roughly equivalent to a controller in the MVC architecture. Java EE has standardised 4 authentication mechanisms for a Servlet container, as well as a JASPIC API profile to provide a custom authentication mechanism for Servlet (and one for SOAP, but let's ignore that for now). Unfortunately standard custom mechanisms are only required to be supported by a full Java EE server, which means the popular web profile and standalone servlet containers are left in the dark. [update: since EE 8 Web Profile supports JASPIC too] Servlet vendors can adopt the standard API if they want and the Servlet spec even encourages th...