Crowd calls its a token I would probably call it a ticket. There's a
method in the Crowd API that you can call to make sure the ticket is
still good. The ticket is a handle to a "login session" at the Crowd
server. You can invalidate that session using the Crowd console to
the Crowd server and, so, that the next time you check to see if the
ticket is still good the Crowd API will say "no". So, you can have a
filter that checks the token/ticket for every page hit/call or after a
certain period expires, say 5 minutes.
This is a fairly common security pattern; at least one that I've run
into on a regular basis. I think we should include it in JSecurity
proper instead of forcing people to make ad hoc solutions; not that
JSecurity doesn't provide adequate methods to do so.
Regards,
Alan
On Nov 24, 2008, at 5:51 AM, Les Hazlewood wrote:
Hi Alan,
This is cool - I like seeing new realms :)
What do you mean exactly when you say "one can invalidate the token
session from the Crowd console". What is a 'token session'?
It sounds as if this token would be a principal - an identifying
attribute of the current user. A credential, strictly speaking, is
something that verifies a user identity by matching a known value. Is
the token really a credential?
Or perhaps it is just something attributed to the current user - not
an identifying attribute like a username or SSN - I dunno. If that is
the case, there's nothing wrong with just sticking it in the session
either (Subject.getSession()). The only benefit of including it as a
principal in the PrincipalCollection is that would be serialized as a
cookie if cookies are enabled, thereby not using a session at all (can
be a good thing depending on architecture, as I'm sure you know).
In any case, I think checking it on a regular basis to make sure it is
still valid is a behavior specific to Crowd, not JSecurity, so I think
it makes sense to do this checking in a filter. If it extends one of
the JSecurity Filter classes, then you can do anything they can do,
like redirect to the login page, etc.
HTH,
Les
On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 4:00 PM, Alan D. Cabrera
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
So, I've checked in my first crack at a crowd based realm. I have
a few
questions.
As you may have noticed, I used enums to direct the behavior of the
realm.
It's not sure to me that this will work within the framework as it
now
stands.
When you log into Crowd you get a token. This token can be checked
on a
regular basis to make sure that it's still valid; one can
invalidate the
token session from the Crowd console. It's not clear to me where I
can
place this check in JSecurity. I'm thinking that I'll need to
write my own
filter that gets the Subject and obtains the credentials object
that I
returned during authentication. In this credential is the token
and I can
use that to check the validity of it.
Thoughts?
Regards,
Alan
