ok, i think i found it. i am doing it programmatically using the JBossTransactionManagerLookup.getTransactionManager() API. While this works, and I am able to explicitly set the "portal.principal" session attribute to a HashMap that contains the Portal User object, I am still not able to get past the main issue which is JBoss Portal not finding the principals though the user has been authenticated. The only thing to note here is that there are 2 applications here, and the session contexts are different. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4071366#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...