In the JEUS security system, a login process is simply associating a Subject with an execution thread (Java thread). This concept is thus different from the concept of authentication. In general, authentication occurs before the Subject is associated with an execution thread. If the authentication is successful, login will proceed as normal, but if the authentication fails, login will also fail.

After a Subject has logged in successfully, all authorization will be performed with respect to this Subject. The login concept may thus be seen as an umbrella that spans both authentication and authorization. The opposite of the login operation is the logout operation, which disassociates the current Subject from the execution thread.

Note that the implementation of the login concept requires a stack-based operation. Several Subjects can be logged in at any time with each new Subject being pushed onto the top of the stack. Only the Subject on top of the stack is used for authorization. When the Subject logs out, the top Subject is simply removed from the stack, and the next Subject at the top of the stack is activated.

This mechanism is shown in the following.

In the JEUS security system, only one login stack is allowed for each Java thread. As shown in the Security System Architecture figure, the login mechanism is implemented by the jeus.security.impl.login.CommonLoginService interface.

Authentication is determining the identity of a caller for the purpose of using it for authorization decisions at a later time.

In the JEUS security system, identities are always represented as principals that are defined by the java.security.Principal interface.

These Principals are always stored as attribute values of the Subject. Subject is implemented by the jeus.security.base.Subject class and gets associated with an execution thread, as previously described. Subject also contains Principals and Credentials as its security attributes.

The following is a UML diagram for a JEUS Subject.

As shown, the Subject has a main Principal, which is the only ID of the Subject. The Subject may also carry any number of additional optional Principals. These are generally non-unique Principals that may be shared by several Subjects (e.g., group Principals).

Subject can also have public or private credentials. Credentials are usually used as a proof to authenticate the Subject or to deliver specific information. An example of a private credential is a password. An example of a public credential is a digital certificate.

The credentials for a given Subject may be created by using its sub-class, credentialFactory class. The actual credentials are obtained from the credential factories using the refresh() method, and they are added to the public or private credential sets.

In the JEUS security system, authorization is determining whether a previously authenticated entity (Subject) should be allowed to perform a particular operation.

Authorization happens at the system level by, for example, allowing only certain Subjects (usually administrators) to boot or shut down the JEUS server. Authorization also happens at the application level when a JEUS engine checks whether a remote caller should be allowed to access a particular application component, such as a specific EJB method or a certain Servlet.

In the JEUS security system, like in J2EE, authorization is a role-based mechanism. The developer or assembler of a J2EE application sets up the security restrictions according to Roles. During the deployment of the application, the user or administrator maps actual Principals in the system to these logical Roles. .

Furthermore, in the JEUS security system, all authorization mappings are expressed as Permissions (actual sub-classes of java.security.Permission). For example, the Principal, user1, may own a Permission that grants him access to a role called R (meaning that user1 is in role R).

The role R may have permission to access the resource JNDI and execute the lookup action.

These concepts are illustrated in the following figure.

As can be seen from the previous figure, only Principals and Roles are actually represented as physical entities. The resource circle in the figure has a dashed outline to denote that resources are implied and not actually modeled in the authorization system.

In the previous figure, the two boxes marked RolePermission and ResourcePermission represent instances of the two classes jeus.security.resource.RolePermission and jeus.security.resource.ResourcePermission, respectively. Both of these classes extend the basic java.security.Permission abstract class, and there are various other sub-classes of the Permission class.

To summarize, a principal owns a set of Permissions and those Permissions grant the principal a set of logical Roles. These Roles in turn own another set of Permissions that grant those Roles access to a set of Actions on the Resources. By following these indirect mappings, one can deduce whether a principal should be allowed to perform a specific Action on a Resource.

The figure above shows that the principal user1 owns a RolePermission. The arrows marked "Owns" in the figure intuitively denotes a direct, static binding. However, the term implies is different. The figure shows that the RolePermission implies role R. It is important to note that this implication binding is not static. It is determines the implication status dynamically at runtime by invoking the method implies(Permission p) on then RolePermission instance.

If the implies() method returns true, the RolePermission is said to imply role R, otherwise it is not. Thus, in the former case, principal user1 is in role R, while in the latter case it is not. The same logic applies for the implication between the role R and the Resource JNDI. For a better understanding of the terminology Permission, refer to the java.security.Permission of J2SE Javadoc.

Given the previous information, it is not difficult to implement dynamic mappings. If we just change the implementation of the implies() method, we can make a Permission imply a role (or Resource) only under certain special conditions. For example, we might want to create a dynamic mapping from principal user1 to role R, which allows user1 to be in role R only during the business hours (9am to 5pm). To do this, we could simply create a new RolePermission sub-class, called TimeConstrainedRolePermisson, and override the implementation of the implies() method. In this method, you can add a check for the additional time-constraint.

For examples, refer to [Figure 1.5] and [Figure 1.6].

As shown in [Figure 1.5], principal user1 is not part of role R.

As shown in the previous figures, the TimeConstrainedRolePermission class contains two variables, Name and Actions. Name is set to the name of the implied Role, R in this case, and the Actions are set to the times when the implication is valid (between 9am and 5pm). Both Name and Actions are standard variables that are declared in most java.security.Permission class implementations.

Moreover, apart from the basic Permission-based mappings, every Permission in the authorization system belongs to one of the following three categories.

A few examples to illustrate these ideas will be shown later.

In the JEUS security system, all Permission mappings are the classes that implement the jeus.security.base.PermissionMap class. These PermissionMap classes are included in the jeus.security.base.Policy class.

Policy class has two kinds of PermissionMaps.

Each PermissionMap contains the 3 aforementioned Permission types, excluded, unchecked and checked permissions. In the case of checked permissions, Permission and role PermissionMap are combined through a principal or Role. Policy and Resource PermissionMap are combined through a context id, which indicates the authorization scope.

The following is a UML diagram of Policy and PermissionMap classes.

All the information is summarized in the following figure.

In the previous figure, we have a Policy instance that contains one principal-to-role mapping (required) and also two role-to-resource mappings with context ids A and B, respectively. All three PermissionMaps contain three sets of permissions as follows.

The elliptical bubbles inside the boxes represent the actual Permission instances (Name: Action) with Name and Action variables.

Let's suppose that a Subject, with context ID A and the principal user1, wants to access JNDI to perform the action "modify."

This authorization query would be processed by the authorization system as follows:

In this process, although user1 is mapped to the role Administrator, since Administrator is also in the excluded set, no one (not even user1) will be in the role Administrator. This is because excluded Permissions have higher precedence over both unchecked and checked Permissions.

Using the previous figure and following the step-by-step instructions above, you should be able to work out the following authorization queries.

Security auditing generally involves capturing security-related events (such as failed authentication and runtime exceptions) and evaluating these events for better overall security.

The JEUS security system features a simple yet flexible auditing mechanism using security events. Whenever something significant happens in the system, such as a failed authentication, a failed authorization, or something else that may be of interest, an Event will be posted to a set of registered event handlers.

The handler implementations, which may be fully customized, responds with an appropriate action, such as locking a Subject's credential in case authentication failed too many times in a row.

As we have mentioned before, each class in the security system that implements security functionalities constitutes as a Service. A Service is simply an implementation of an SPI (Service Provider Interface) that provides some security functionality, whether it is authentication, authorization, networking, or other things.

SPI is short for Service Provider Interface and is an abstract class of the Java package jeus.security.spi. These SPI classes should be extended and implemented in order to implement customized security functionality. The extended sub-classes of an SPI class are called Services.

All instances of Services in the security system are treated individually as independent entities whose services are called as needed. However, it is also quite common for a Service implementation to make calls to another SPI, and some dependency may exist among different Services. In order to initialize Services. All Services receives a key–value pair property value used to initialize the Service. The configuration data of a Service can also be saved in a configuration file.

All Services may also optionally define a JMX bean that will be exported to the JEUS management system. The JMX MBean is normally created based on a MBeanInfo instance returned by the Service.getMBeanInfo() method.

All Services have two states, created state and destroyed state. The create() and destroy() methods are called to transition between the two states. Calling these methods will invoke doCreate() and doDestroy() abstract methods. These abstract methods should be implemented by Service sub-classes for service initialization and management.

Following is the Service class diagram and various SPI classes in the jeus.security.spi package.

At runtime, Service instances are created by the singleton class called SecurityInstaller. A simple SecurityInstaller class can be implemented just by writing the necessary code. A more sophisticated implementation would save the service name and property values to a specific configuration file and use the information to instantiate and initialize the Service. The default SecurityInstaller implementation operates according to the latter approach, providing a very simple and flexible way to add new Service implementations to the security system.

Security domain is a collection of security Service instances. Several domains may exist concurrently within the security system. The purpose of a domain is to allow different deployed applications and JEUS sub-systems to use different security Services. A domain separates the security Services for each application.

For example, the JEUS server could be set up to use a special domain. In this case, it's call the SYSTEM_DOMAIN. This domain contains Subjects and Policies that are used to manage the JEUS server. For example, the SYSTEM_DOMAIN contains the user information for a main Subject called administrator, which can be used to boot or shut down the server.

Another domain, let's call it APP_DOMAIN, could be used by a deployed J2EE application. That domain might also contain a user information for a Subject called administrator, which is different from the JEUS server administrator. You could also configure a different repository mechanism for each domain. While the SYSTEM_DOMAIN can be configured to use a simple XML file to store Subject information, the APP_DOMAIN can be configured to use a remote database to read and write Subject information.

The domain concept is illustrated in the following figure.

Use of the domain feature is optional. If no domain is specified, a special SYSTEM_DOMAIN will be used.

By default, JEUS uses two domains, SYSTEM_DOMAIN and SHARED_DOMAIN, as follows:

To apply different security services to applications, create a separate domain and configure the domain.xml file. For more information about creating and configuring security domains, refer to "Chapter 2. Configuring the Security System".

This chapter explains how to minimize the performance impact that the security system has on the overall performance of the JEUS Server.

The following are the ways of improving performance of the overall security system.

This section explains how to improve the security system level despite a performance hit.

The following are the ways to improve overall security level of JEUS: