Thanks Sohil. Yes, this is exactly what I am doing (I also tried using the JBoss TransactionManager class directly, and that worked too). Now, I am able to explicitly set the "portal.principal" session attribute to this user but like I mentioned earlier, it still doesn't help. The principals are not set by JBoss Portal and therefore, I can't access the portal. Authentication is done using a custom security realm and all of it goes through fine but for some reason, it doesn't find the principals. If you could suggest a way to set the principals manually after doing the authentication, that would be immensely helpful. Thanks. - krish View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4071378#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...