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

[Mark Struberg]

Switching languages is a business concern in some companies. 

And the example with the role switching was just ONE example. There are dozen others. Now you could go on and add all those things into a next spec adding another 450++ classes. But no one gonna use that!

JASPIC and EE security is pretty much a disaster area right now because it did NOT step back a few meters and tried to just introduce APIs which are generic (or specific) enough to be very flexible.


I can do 100% of what you can do with JavaEE security in a simple Servlet Filter, a CDI producer and an interceptor within 300 lines. And all this is really extensible and works perfectly for all my customers weirdest use cases (like integration into HOST security, etc).



I think JASPIC & Co has to be ditched and a totally new approach needs to be made.


I know this might be an extreme position and we might finally meet in the middle. But this is what I've seen in MANY companies. EE security is 

a.) to hard to understand and thus

b.) not well understood

c.) too complex
d.) without giving you all the bits you need in practice

thus it's really way easier to simply hack a ServletFilter and an own Principal system to guard your secured resources. You then also have the ability to use the same mechanism in e.g. batches, standalone SE programs etc. 


And the best thing: it is really portable, which most of the EE security stuff is NOT. There you always need to tweak container specific config, add LoginModule totally different each time, etc


LieGrue,
strub





> On Monday, 22 December 2014, 22:55, arjan tijms <arjan.tijms at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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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