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JAAS Introduction

What is JAAS?

The Java Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS) is a integrated package comes with Java 2 SDK. Basically JAAS is designed to achieve two things,

Authentication - determine who is executing the code
Authorization - ensure user/code has access control right to perform an action

 JAAS for Authentication

JAAS modules related to authentication are connected in a pluggable manner. So it promotes the reuse of underline authentication technology with different applications. Following are the key classes we use in authentication process.


LoginContext

This is the start point of the authentication process. This class contains 3 methods as,
  • login()  - authenticate user
  • logout() - logout user
  • getSubject() - get authenticated user
When we initiate a LoginContext, we provide required configurations to handle authentication. So we can change underlying authentication technology from the configuration without updating the application logic.

Configuration

This specifies the underline authentication technology which includes following,
  • Login Modules
  • Order of Login Modules
  • Flag values which decide the behavior(Required, Requisite, Sufficient, Optional)
  • Options which are consumed by Login Modules
Default implementation of Configuration is ConfigFile which loads the configurations from a file. We can set the configuration file via "-Djava.security.auth.login.config"" option.

LoginModule

This class contains the underline authentication mechanism. The interface LoginModule consists of 5 methods,
  • initialize() - LoginContext call this method to initialize the login module
  • login() - Authentication happens inside this method
  • commit() - After successful authentication user principal creation happens here
  • abort() - In case of failure, it handled here
  • logout() - Remove principal in case of logout

CallbackHandler

This class is responsible for collect and provide authentication information to the LoginModule. Same LoginModule may use different callback handlers to get credential from different sources. We can pass a CallbackHandler instance while creating a LoginContext.

Callback

Callback is the container which carries authentication information. LoginModule passes array of Callbacks to the CallbackHandler to get credentials.


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