[jboss-jira] [JBoss JIRA] (SECURITY-709) Auth. using LdapLoginModule does not return HTTP 500 when the LDAP server not available

[Anil Saldhana (JIRA)]

    [ https://issues.jboss.org/browse/SECURITY-709?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=12741048#comment-12741048 ] 

Anil Saldhana commented on SECURITY-709:
----------------------------------------

Our authentication is not coupled either to the web container or LDAP server. What decides is the security domain. The security domain defines a bunch of login modules.  So when JAAS system throws an loginexception, we return either true/false as to the status of the authentication process. The web container's security uses this true/false to either proceed to authorization checks or return 401 (case of BASIC, SPNego usecases).

Yi, we cannot accept this JIRA request.
                
> Auth. using LdapLoginModule does not return HTTP 500 when the LDAP server not available
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: SECURITY-709
>                 URL: https://issues.jboss.org/browse/SECURITY-709
>             Project: PicketBox 
>          Issue Type: Bug
>      Security Level: Public(Everyone can see) 
>          Components: PicketBox
>    Affects Versions: PicketBox_v4_0_7
>            Reporter: Yi Chen
>            Assignee: Anil Saldhana
>
> I am using the LdapLoginModule from PicketBox in JBoss AS 7.1.1 to enable authentication against our company's LDAP server. However, I always get a HTTP 401 back no matter what kind of problem caused the authentication failure. Tracing through the Picketbox and JBoss code, I found that the problem seems to be from the private method "proceedWithJaasLogin" in "JBossCachedAuthenticationManager". At the end of this method:
> ...
> 	   catch (LoginException e)
> 	   {
> 		   // Don't log anonymous user failures unless trace level logging is on
> 		   if (principal != null && principal.getName() != null || trace)
> 			   log.error("Login failure", e);
> 		   authException = e;
> 	   }
> 	   // Set the security association thread context info exception
> 	   SubjectActions.setContextInfo("org.jboss.security.exception", authException);
> 	   return authenticated;
> }
> So basically, whatever exception that was sent up from the login modules is simply store in the thread context. The methods then simply returns true or false to indicate whether an authentication is successful or not. Whatever exception is store in the thread context doesn't appear to be used to generate a more appropriate error code to the client.
> Steps to reproduce:
> Just set up a LdapLoginModule and verify that it can be used to authenticate some users for a web application. Then shut down the LDAP server and try again. The client of the web application will always get back HTTP 401.

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