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JCas - JAAS Authorization

 
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JCas User Guide

        Introduction
        Setup
        First CAS server
        Access Control
        JDBC Database Authorization
        JAAS User Authorization
        SSL Setup
        JSP Taglib
        JCas Client
        JLL - JAAS Login Library

Reference

        Release Notes
        JCas Configuration
        FAQ
        Help Forum

JCas Developers

        API Javadocs
        CAS Specification

Overview

Initially, JCas was not defined to include a JAAS based authorization mechanism. But one day, a colleague and friend of mine (Thanks to Radek!) came to me and mentioned it would be nice to have JAAS included. I had no experience with JAAS at that time but a rough idea of what it is.

I learned more about it a few weeks later when reading documentation from Sun's Java Homepage. I quickly understood that configuring JAAS is somewhat tricky and implementing a JAAS service even more, but integrating it with JCas would be a perfect addendum. And it even required not much effort. So it went in within a few hours.

How to configure JAAS

This section will not cover how to configure JAAS itself. You can easily read that at Sun's JAAS Documentation. Here we will concentrate on integrating JAAS into JCas schemes.

First you need to setup a JAAS context as described in the Sun documentation or whatever JAAS provider you want to integrate. Let's assume for now, your context is named MY_JAAS_CONTEXT.

Now it is very simple: Just specify the context's name in the scheme's definition:

    ...
    <Scheme>
        ...
        <Jaas>MY_JAAS_CONTEXT</Jaas>
        ...
    </Scheme>
    ...
    				
That's it. Please beware that you cannot have JDBC and JAAS authentication at once in a single scheme. The scheme either uses JDBC or JAAS.

Another drawback (if you regard it that way) is that you can't have more than one JAAS contexts within a single scheme.