[security-dev] How to let the valve ServiceProviderAuthenticator be conditionally bypassed ?

[Adam Dong]

Hi, guys,

Thanks to some of your help. I have successfully configured ServiceProviderAuthenticator as an Value (in context.xml) in Tomcat to protect my web app whose web.xml needs to have  <security-constraint>, <login-config> (with FORM being auth method) etc, and the whole thing worked as expected against my IDP.

Now I have a special need to either let the SAML  auth happen or bypass it (not just bypass SAML auth, but bypass the FORM-based auth altogether). Here is what I tried but it didn't work:

public class MyServiceProviderAuthenticator extends ServiceProviderAuthenticator
{
    @Override
    public boolean authenticate(Request req, Response res, LoginConfig loginconfig)
        throws IOException
    {
           if ("true".equals(req.getParamter("bypass")))  {  // bypass SAML authentication
               return true;
           }
           return super.authenticate(req, res, loginconfig);
    }
}

When that flag was not set, SAML interaction happened, everything worked.

When the flag was set, this method simply returned true, then I simply got "HTTP Status 403 - Access to the requested resource has been denied." on the browser. 

Why the failure ? Is it because I didn't set the principal or didn't satisfy something that FORM-based auth needed.

Thanks a lot in advance for any clue.

Adam