I was trying to learn JAAS, then i came up with the terms SAML and Realm, and now I am confused.
In any of the basic tutorials of JAAS, we are pretty much configuring the basic that a normal Realm configuration is. If I read configuration of SAML then it looks similar as JAAS. I have absolutely no idea why different names. May be SAML is built on Realm and JAAS on SAML, not sure can any body please clearly state the difference.
Please a humble request if you share any link, Please define a bit of it, so that it help me when i am reading them.
I have successfully configured, JAAS's BASIC and FROM based authentication on both JBOSS and Glassfish. It helped me to protect my JSP and Servelets (Web Project). where to look if I want to protect an EJB as part of my application.
JAAS is a set of standard APIs for Java SE and EE which provide basic ways to achieve authentication and limited authorization. The typical use of JAAS for authentication is through LoginModules. Implementation of a LoginModule interface (javax.security.auth.spi.LoginModule) is able to authenticate user based on credentials provided by the caller in CallbackHandler. Most application servers allows you to plug-in your own LoginModules. Other key concepts of JAAS are Subject (a collection of information about a user) and Principal (a single attribute of a user - an ID, a password). Capabilities of JAAS for authorization are rather limited and are rarely used directly.
The standard authentication mechanism for Java web applications (like FORM, BASIC or DIGEST declared in your web.xml descriptor) typically delegate verification of the provided credentials to the configured JAAS LoginModules.
Realm is a concept used to denote separation of authentication and authorization policies for different applications/systems. E.g. if you want to authenticate users in application A using LDAP and applicaton B uses database table, you can put them into different security realms, so that their security requirments are isolated and correctly enforced. The typical system which uses this term is Tomcat, but you will find similarities in othe containers/application servers too. In most cases (e.g. when depoying a single application) you don't need to worry about Realms too much.
Java EE provides standard mechanisms for securing of EJBs using role based access control (RBAC). You first define which roles are applicable to your application, then define which users accessing your application belong to which roles. You can then use either declarative authorization (= annotate your methods with security annotations such as #RolesAllowed, #PermitAll, #DeclareRoles, or do the same using XML descriptors) or programmatic authorization (= test whether user belongs to a role by calling isCallerInRole on EJBContext directly in your code). A basic tutorial can be found here http://docs.oracle.com/javaee/6/tutorial/doc/bnbyl.html
SAML is a very different beast from the previous ones. In a very simplistic way you can see SAML WebSSO as an authentication method. Generally SAML is a standard which defines an XML-based protocol used to transfer information about users, their authentication events and security attributes between remote systems in a secure way. Apart from the protocol itself SAML standard defines typical use-cases for the protocol, the most common being Web Single Sign-On (a possibility to authenticate user externally from the application at an entity called Identity Provider and login to an application - Service Provider without revealing user's credentials to it). In these use-cases SAML is similar to OpenID or OAuth 2.0 authentication you can see provided by Facebook or Google to 3rd party developers.
Hope this helps,
Vladimir Schafer
See if this helps you. A realm is a area where a specific configuration is in place. JAAS and SAML are both authentication modules that can be configured to handle authentication on that reaml. SAML is an authentication scheme. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_Assertion_Markup_Language
To add to the other answers, I found the following explanation from this article to be helpful:
In reality, SAML and JAAS are two distinct security frameworks. SAML is an XML framework for exchanging authentication and authorization information. SAML provides a standard XML schema for specifying authentication, attribute, and authorization decision statements, and it additionally specifies a Web services-based request/reply protocol for exchanging these statements.
JAAS, on the other hand, through implementation-specific login modules receives information about the user, authenticates the user, and verifies that they are a valid subject.
So as I understand it, JAAS can be used to implement custom authentication and authorization for your app, and there are many possible ways to do this, some of which involve SAML. For example, you could use SAML to get the user's identity and role/group information; this would be stored in XML tokens that your JAAS module would need to parse.
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We are developing a Java based product. We need to make the authentication part to fit for major authentication services, like LDAP, OpenID, Oauth2, SAML. The idea is, when we deploying the product for a company who is having LDAP, our product should be able to cater it. If the company has OAuth2, then our product should be able to cater that as well.
I want to know, what are the better approaches and tools. I'm looking for a open source solution which support all these protocols in one place. Please share the knowledge.
I'd suggest Spring Security. It is completely independent to the Spring Core framework and with some simple configuration and some additional libraries (also developed by the same team), you can get a simple solution for most of the popular authentication methods.
With a couple of annotations, you can configure which methods or endpoints you want secured either.
You can create spring profiles, who decide which authentication method to be used.
Simple approach is to use an IAM (identity and access management) solution. Kecloak is a good open source one (and is written in java but you shouldn't mind).
By the way, your question is off-topic (recommending software or tools). Post it here
You need to separate out Identity repositories and Identity protocols.
LDAP and AD are repositories.
OpenID, OAuth2, SAML are protocols.
You need an IAM system that handles all the protocols and sits on top of the repositories.
For your product to talk to your IAM, you need a protocol stack in your product e.g. for SAML.
You then federate your IAM with other vendors e.g. if a vendor comes along and wants to authenticate with their AD, they would install ADFS and then ADFS federates with your IAM system.
So the logical flow goes:
User --> authenticate on their IAM --> trusted by your IAM --> access to your application granted.
You could also look at Identity as a Service e.g. Azure AD, Auth0, Okta etc.
I am trying to design a JAAS microservice which handles user authentication for multiple J2EE applications. Currently we have multiple applications which authenticate against our LDAP and have seperate role-systems.
Now I am stuck at designing the interface between the application and the authentication backend.
Via custom LoginModule: Design a custom login module which uses a nonsecured EJB interface from our LoginService to authenticate and authorize, but i remembered reading that login modules can't be injected with EJBs / use EJBs.
Is this the right starting point, or do i have other possibilities to refactor JAAS security out of our applications? Has somebody done something like that before?
I had been curious about Java security some time before. I have found nice framework Picketlink.
Despite it needs quite high threshold to entry, it is much more flexible than JAAS and handles most typical needs.
I am starting with new Spring project where i am planning to use SSO. I have red the blogs and come to know spring security SAML will be best solution for SP.
So i have implemented Spring Security SAML sample application provided by spring site https://github.com/SpringSource/spring-security-saml as SP along with Shibboleth IDP.
IDP connects with LDAP server. I am able to execute the Spring security sample application.
I am confused how can i use this Spring security SAML extension along with multiple spring projects.
Any example link or suggestions on architecturing the Spring SAML project integration with multiple Spring MVC application will be helpful.
Provided your REST APIs are only called by the web application which is deployed together with them (in a single war and therefore sharing the same HTTP session) you can use Spring SAML + Spring Security to secure them.
Spring SAML will be used to authenticate the users against a remote IDP and populate their entitlements (granted authorities); Spring Security can then be used to define security policies for the APIs called from the UI.
In case you want to be able to call the REST APIs from remote clients, you may want to look into the Spring Security OAuth project - as this is no longer about web single sign-on.
It is possible to create a central installation of Spring SAML which handles all SSO logic. Of course you will need to implement a mechanism in which Spring SAML relays information about the authenticated user and her attributes to your other applications, and do so in a secure way. One possible way to approach it (provided the applications are deployed on the same domain and therefore can share cookies) is to:
after authentication in Spring SAML set a shared cookie which is visible to all the other applications and which is e.g. signed by the Spring SAML's key, or encrypted using a shared key, the cookie should also contain user's attributes
this can be done in a custom AuthenticationSuccessHandler which is subsequently expected to redirect user to the correct application (e.g. based on some custom logic or relay state)
the target application needs to verify the cookie (by checking the signature or decrypting using a shared key, possibly performing other checks), parse the attributes and start own session which is pre-authenticated based on the content of the cookie
All of this can be done with implementations to standard interfaces of Spring Security and Spring SAML. But it's not a trivial task - mainly considering that any security vulnerability in your implementation might compromise security of your applications.
Is there a Java provider implementation of the OAuth's Resource Owner Password flow or a library to include in my project?
I have read that Spring Security provides those libraries with a server or provider implementation, can I only include those Spring libraries to my standard Java EE project without using the full Spring stack?
Could it be possible or reasonable to implement the OAuth provider and client for that flow following the RFC?
The UAA project uses Spring Security's OAuth provider to implement a full OAuth2 authorization server (including resource owner grant). Why not use that?
You can't "only include those Spring libraries to my standard Java EE project" without using Spring. It's not really clear from your question how you would expect that to work. Where would the authorization server be implemented, for example?
It's certainly possible to implement the OAuth2 provider yourself, especially if you are only using part of the spec, but it's not trivial and probably not "reasonable" if it is just incidental to your main application development.
You will still need to consider how to protect your resource servers when they are accessed by an application which has obtained a token from the authorization server. In other words, they need to be able to check and understand the token that is issued and make an access decision based on it.
I am currently trying to implement a single sign on solution across multiple JVM based (Grails, Servlets) web applications currently all deployed in the same servlet container (currently Tomcat, but don't want to limit my solution to just Tomcat). All web applications share a common database.
I've looked at various options from using CAS or other third party libraries to creating a new web service to handle Single Sign On, but none seem to really satisfy the business. My current implementation involves creating a new jar library which has a common implementation of AuthenticationProviders, and Pre-Authentication Filters based on Spring Security.
In this approach I have multiple AuthenticationProviders (currently Active Directory, and Database) for the application to authenticate against. Upon successful authentication a row would be inserted in a session table that contains the user, an expiration time, and a token. The token would be also stored as a cookie on the user's machine and that would be used to validate they have a current session in the Pre-Authentication Filters.
Having never done this before I want to make sure I'm not creating a huge security problem, and I'd also like to know what I would need to create the token? At this point a simple GUID seems to be sufficent?
Currently we are working on Spring Security 3.0.x, and haven't upgraded to 3.1 yet.
Thanks in advance.
I ended up solving this problem by doing the following:
I created a AuthenticationSuccessHandler which would add a cookie to the user's session which had identifying information as well as the hostname to try to secure it as much as possible. (The application was running internally at most customer sites so the risks here were determined to be minimal, but be careful about cookie jacking.)
Then on each application that needed to have SSO I implemented a AbstractPreAuthenticatedProcessingFilter, and placed in before the authentication filter which would pull the cookie out and create an Authentication object. Lastly I created an AuthenticationProvider which validated the information from the cookie.
Hopefully that helps someone else in the future for this type of request.
There are extensions available for KERBEROS, OAuth and SAML available on the Spring Security Extensions website. Here is the blog entry which provides an example: SpringSource Blog
If you are using NTLM as your SSO Provider, take a look at the jespa-spring project.
Or you might want to look at the Java Open Single Sign-On Project