[cdi-dev] Thoughts on Phases and Events for the Security spec

[arjan tijms]

Hi,

On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 8:54 PM, Mark Struberg <struberg at yahoo.de> wrote:
> To be honest I'm not sure if I'd do any of this. All this should imo not belong to the EE spec at all. It is probably just far too business specific.

What exactly should not be done? Authentication events, or the
enumeration Antonio mentioned?


> What if the application needs some kind of role change. E.g. you temporarily switch roles, change the preferred language, etc? All these things are heavily depending on the application and are not technical at all.

I'm not sure what the preferred language has to do with this. This is
not an authentication concern, but simply a user preference and indeed
an application concern.

Switching roles however is an authentication concern. It's IMHO not
business specific. There are two variations, a temporarily one as you
mention, and a "permanent" one (permanent within a session, or as
authentication in Java EE is by default per request, even do this for
just the remainder of the request).

The temporary one can be implemented via authentication stacks, and
this can definitely be implemented in a completely non business
specific way. In a declarative way @RunAs already does this in a way.
A programmatic API could look like the following:

request.authenticateStacked(); // Starts new authentication dialog, if
authenticated previous identity is stored on stack
request.authenticateStackedAs(String username); // Programmatic
equivalent of @RunAs
request.authenticateStacked(Callback... callbacks); // Generic
variant, supporting extendible options such as adding/removing roles
request.logoutCurrent(); // logs out current user, goes back one level
on the stack
request.logout(); // existing API, totally logs user out

A "permanent" change is typical when for instance a username is linked
to a user email, and the user changes his email. The act of changing
this email is application specific, but just signaling this change to
the container is a general action (see
https://java.net/jira/browse/JASPIC_SPEC-22).

Events can be largely orthogonal to all of this, although perhaps some
properties of the event could give information about the authenticate
type (new one, or stacked one).

Kind regards,
Arjan Tijms







>
> LieGrue,
> strub
>
>
>
> On Monday, 22 December 2014, 20:12, arjan tijms <arjan.tijms at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>
>>
>>Hi,
>>
>>On Monday, December 22, 2014, Antonio Goncalves <antonio.goncalves at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>Hi all,
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>The CDI spec defines the "Transactional observer methods" (§10.4.5) with a TransactionPhase :
>>>
>>>
>>>public enum TransactionPhase {
>>>  IN_PROGRESS,
>>>  BEFORE_COMPLETION,
>>>  AFTER_COMPLETION,
>>>  AFTER_FAILURE,
>>>  AFTER_SUCCESS
>>>}
>>>
>>>
>>>void onDocumentUpdate(@Observes(during=AFTER_SUCCESS) @Updated Document doc) { ... }
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>Now that there is a new Security specification coming along, it would be helpful to be able to observe before/after the user logs-in or logs-out, for example. First I thought "well, the Security spec defines a set of events, fires them, and we just have to observe them". But what about the "during" phase ? What would make more sense in such use case ? Using the same "during" mechanism or events ?
>>
>>
>>I think separate events may be better.
>>
>>
>>Maybe I'm mistaken but the way I think the transactional events are used is that during a transactional method an event is fired. The event is then not delivered right away to all observers, but for those using during=after_success only when the TX commits. This is kinda like what JMS does; a message is only send when the TX commits, or send right away. CDI offers 3 other cases, but I feel that those first two are the main ones.
>>
>>
>>For authentication events I don't think we can really speak of a "logging-in" method. Even if we would appoint one (e.g. validateRequest() in a SAM) then I'm not sure whether any random event published during that method would have any need to be queued until just before or after authentication actually happens.
>>
>>
>>Instead, we would merely be interested in the actual events; the moment the container is about to authenticate (so we can potentially veto) and the moment right after that (so we can take an action such as loading data related to the user into the current session).
>>
>>
>>Just my 2 cents. Hope I understood the case correctly.
>>
>>
>>Kind regards,
>>Arjan
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>>public enum LoginPhase {
>>>  BEFORE_LOGIN,
>>>  AFTER_LOGIN,
>>>  BEFORE_LOGOUT,
>>>  AFTER_LOGOUT,
>>>}
>>>
>>>
>>>void onLogout(@Observes(during=BEFORE_LOGOUT) User user) { ... }
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>Any thoughts ?
>>>
>>>--
>>>
>>>Antonio Goncalves
>>>Software architect, Java Champion and Pluralsight author
>>>
>>>Web site | Twitter | LinkedIn | Pluralsight | Paris JUG | Devoxx France
>>
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>>
>>