(Adding Marcel to CC, as he worked on the PicketLink-Seam integration)

Just to clarify a few things with the Seam/PicketLink integration. The core security API in Seam 3 will not be changing drastically, it's a proven API and it's what our users are already intimately familiar with. What we *will* be doing is offloading all of the enterprisey-type security features such as SSO, SAML, SPNEGO, Kerberos, OpenID integration, etc onto PicketLink. I can't explain 100% how this will be done at this stage because I'm just starting to get into the integration work now, however we will most likely be providing the following things at the very minimum:

1) A filter that will propagate any servlet container security context (i.e. the logged in user and their roles) to Seam if they are not already authenticated (see https://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/JBSEAM-4559). This feature in itself will take care of a whole heap of the security features that I mentioned above, and allow us to remove our own implementation of BASIC/DIGEST HTTP authentication (something that would be preferable for us not to maintain).

2) A filter that will propagate Seam's security context to PicketBox. I've written this already (with Anil's help) - what this filter does is allow users to use the built-in JEE security annotations, such as @RolesAllowed, etc on their beans.

3) Provide integration with PicketLink IDM via a Seam IdentityStore implementation. This will give our users greater options as to which type of security providers they can use for their apps.

This list is just a starting point, and I'm sure as we make some more progress we will find more areas where it will be advantageous to have some form of tighter integration. The point of this exercise though is really to draw a line between which security features Seam will provide, and which features we will delegate to PicketLink.

Our recommendation to users will be to just use the existing Seam Security features for their standalone, self-contained apps that require simple authentication based on a database or LDAP server. Once their requirements grow beyond this however, our recommendation will be to use Seam/PicketLink. PicketLink will be "the" way to do any federated/enterprise identity stuff in Seam.

This will allow us (the Seam team) to curb the amount of development effort that we otherwise have to put into providing extra security features in Seam.

Hopefully that paints a clearer picture ;)

Shane

On 07/03/10 03:18, Dan Allen wrote:

Anil,

I like the idea that we are separating out the security logic from Seam 3 so that it can mature and integrate in its own cycles...basically not being tied to Seam.

However, what concerns me is the change in developer experience. Security in Seam 2 is so simple to understand. There is barely any configuration, it ties in nicely with the managed ORM sessions and it covers role-based, rule-based and ACL authorization, plain and simple.

From looking at the PicketBox wiki pages, I just see a lot of configuration that makes my eyes cross. I just don't get what I am looking at, really. Either it is going to be more complicated, or you guys just don't have a basic example for people to grok. Can you paint a clearer picture for us?

Thanks,

-Dan

On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 12:32 PM, PicketBox JBoss <picketbox@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all,
(I created this gmail address for twitter for Project PicketBox. I may as well use it for mailing lists).

Shane and I had a couple of days of intense discussion on security at Brisbane last week. Some of those discussions were fed back into the PicketBox project.

Read more on Project PicketBox here:
http://anil-identity.blogspot.com/2010/03/project-picketbox-security-for-java.html

I guess when Seam 3 is released, we are going to offload majority of the security code to PicketBox.

I will be loitering around this dev list to basically answer any security related questions.

Regards,
Anil Saldhana

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Dan Allen
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