Re: [security] Authentication mechanism

[Jan Bartel]

Alan,
There's two points I'd like to raise about the proposed mechanism.
I think this mechanism is not dynamic enough. In the real world, users 
are dynamically granted and revoked roles at runtime. With the proposed 
mechanism I can't see any way to accomodate that - the whole webapp 
would have to be stopped and restarted if just one user was granted a 
role on the fly and wanted to exercise it.

Also, it is impractical to fully enumerate all of the principals and 
their role mappings in a deployment descriptor - many applications in 
the corporate world contain thousands of users with many different roles 
each.

The information about users and their roles is maintained by the 
Security Realm. We just need a mechanism whereby when the user is 
authenticated, we are able to pull out their roles from the Security 
Realm, convert them into Permissions and associate them with the 
Subject. I'll have a bit more of a think and see if I can come up with a 
firm mechanism proposal.

cheers,
Jan





Alan D. Cabrera wrote:
The Geronimo deployment descriptor will have an additional security
statement:
 
3) a mapping of principals to roles.
 
So when the commit statement occurs, WebRoleRefPermission (servletname,
role), will be added to a principal's Permissions collection.  When a
servlet calls the method isUserInRole(role) on a HttpRequest, the
ContextManager will grab the current Ssubject's context and do a
permission check; remember that this context was created, and registered
in the Geronimo login wrapper, using that Subject and so, its registered
ProtectionDomain contains the set of Principals that belong to that
Subject.  I think you know what happens after that, a call through the
Java security architecture which calls the implies() of the registered
Policy, which gets the registered Policy configuration, which checks the
permission.
 
 
Regards,
Alan

	-----Original Message----- 
	From: Jan Bartel 
	Sent: Thu 11/27/2003 3:30 PM 
	To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
	Cc: 
	Subject: Re: [security] Authentication mechanism
	
	

	Hi Alan,
	
	The web.xml file contains security statements that
	1) define some role name mappings (role-name/role-link)
	2) define which roles are permitted to access resources
	
	These then get translated into Permissions by the
	PolicyConfigurationWeb.commit() when the web.xml is deployed.
	Fine so far.
	
	Now, when a servlet calls the method isUserInRole(role) on a
HttpRequest
	we need to determine whether the call is executing on behalf of
an
	(authenticated) user who is able to act in the role specified.
Pre-JACC,
	this has been accomplished by matching the role argument against
the set
	of roles associated with the user which were retrieved by the
	LoginModule when the user logged in.
	
	With JACC, it looks like the impl of the isUserInRole (role) has
to
	concoct a WebRoleRefPermission (servletname, role) and for the
security
	infrastructure to check if that permission has been granted to
the user
	(Subject). So, how does the security infrastructure perform that
check?
	How does it determine if user X can act in the role Y? Doesn't
it
	require some piece of code to convert a user's roles into
	WebRoleRefPermissions and associate them with the user's
Subject?
	
	Hope that clarifies my confusion a bit :-)
	
	thanks
	Jan
	
	Alan D. Cabrera wrote:
	> All the roles and permissions are in the web.xml.  What do you
mean by
	> the dynamic
	> granting of roles to users?
	> 
	> 
	> Regards,
	> Alan
	>
	>       -----Original Message-----
	>       From: Jan Bartel
	>       Sent: Thu 11/27/2003 3:51 AM
	>       To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
	>       Cc:
	>       Subject: Re: [security] Authentication mechanism
	>      
	>      
	>
	>       Just to add to my list of questions ...
	>      
	>       How does the current mechanism implemented in
	>       o.a.g.security.PolicyConfigurationWeb.commit() cope with
the
	> dynamic
	>       granting of roles to users? Looks like it is all set in
concrete
	> at the
	>       time of the commit(), or are the roles and permissions
concerned
	> those
	>       described in the web.xml?
	>      
	>       thanks again
	>       Jan
	>      
	>      
	>      
	>       Jan Bartel wrote:
	>       > I'm just taking a look at integrating the web tier
security
	> with
	>       > Geronimo security. I've got a couple of questions:
	>       >
	>       > 1.  When/who should call setMBeanServer on the
	>       >     GeronimoLoginConfiguration? Should I call it
	>       >     just before doing a LoginContext login() call?
	>       >
	>       >
	>       > 2.  What code is responsible for configuring the
SecurityRealm
	>       >     instances? Should they be configurable from the
	>       >     security-service.xml file?
	>       >
	>       > 3.  I still can't work out where the mapping of the
user's
	> roles
	>       >     that are retrieved by the SecurityRealm are turned
into
	> permissions
	>       >     suitable for a HttpRequest.isUserInRole() call
impl?
	>       >
	>       > Any pointers on any of these would be welcome.
	>       >
	>       > thanks
	>       > Jan
	>      
	>      
	>      
	>