Jetty/Tutorial/JAAS

Introduction

Using JAAS with jetty is very simply a matter of declaring a org.mortbay.jetty.plus.jaas.JAASUserRealm, creating a jaas login module configuration file and specifying it on the jetty run line.

Details

Let's look at an example.

Step 1

Configure a Jetty org.mortbay.jetty.plus.jaas.JAASUserRealm to match the <realm-name> in your web.xml file. For example, if the web.xml contains a realm called "xyzrealm":

<login-config>
  <auth-method>FORM</auth-method>
  <realm-name>xyzrealm</realm-name>
  <form-login-config>
    <form-login-page>/login/login</form-login-page>
    <form-error-page>/login/error</form-error-page>
  </form-login-config>
</login-config>

Then the following JAASUserRealm would be declared in a Jetty configuration file:

<Call name="addUserRealm">
  <Arg>
    <New class="org.mortbay.jetty.plus.jaas.JAASUserRealm">
      <Set name="name">xyzrealm</Set>
      <Set name="LoginModuleName">xyz</Set>
    </New>
  </Arg>
</Call>

It is imperative that the contents of the realm-name element in web.xml file and the value of the 'name' property of the JAASUserRealm instance are exactly the same

Step 2

Set up your LoginModule in a configuration file, following the syntax rules:

xyz {
       com.acme.SomeLoginModule required debug=true;
    };

It is imperative that the application name to the left of the opening brace is exactly the same as the value of the 'LoginModuleName' property specified in Step 2.

Step 3

Invoke jetty with the jaas configuration file you created in step 2:

> java -Djava.security.auth.login.config=mylogin.conf -jar start.jar etc/myjetty.xml

A Closer Look at the JAASUserRealm

To allow the greatest degree of flexibility in using JAAS with web applications, the JAASUserRealm supports a couple of configuration options. Note that you don't ordinarily need to set these explicitly, as Jetty has defaults which will work in 99% of cases. However, should you need to, you can configure:

• a policy for role-based authorization (Default: org.mortbay.jetty.plus.jaas.StrictRoleCheckPolicy)
• a CallbackHandler (Default: org.mortbay.jetty.plus.jaas.callback.DefaultCallbackHandler)
• a list of classnames for the Principal implementation that equate to a user role (Default: org.mortbay.jetty.plus.jaas.JAASRole)

Here's an example of setting each of these (to their default values):

<New class="org.mortbay.jetty.plus.jaas.JAASUserRealm">
  <Set name="Name">xyzrealm</Set>
  <Set name="LoginModuleName">xyz</Set>
  <Set name="RoleCheckPolicy">
    <New class="org.mortbay.jetty.plus.jaas.StrictRoleCheckPolicy"/>
  </Set>
  <Set name="CallbackHandlerClass">
    org.mortbay.jetty.plus.jaas.callback.DefaultCallbackHandler
  </Set>
  <Set name="roleClassNames">
    <Array type="java.lang.String">
      <Item>org.mortbay.jetty.plus.jaas.JAASRole</Item>
    </Array>
  </Set>
</New>

RoleCheckPolicy

The RoleCheckPolicy must be an implementation of the org.mortbay.jetty.plus.jaas.RoleCheckPolicy interface and its purpose is to help answer the question "is User X in Role Y" for role-based authorization requests. The default implementation distributed with jetty is the org.mortbay.jetty.plus.jaas.StrictRoleCheckPolicy, which will assess a user as having a particular role iff that role is at the top of the stack of roles that have been temporarily pushed onto the user or if the user has no temporarily assigned roles, the role is amongst those configured for the user.

Roles can be temporarily assigned to a user programmatically by using the pushRole(String rolename) method of the org.mortbay.jetty.plus.jaas.JAASUserPrincipal class.

For the majority of webapps, the default StrictRoleCheckPolicy will be quite adequate, however you may provide your own implementation and set it on your JAASUserRealm instance.

CallbackHandler

A CallbackHandler is responsible for interfacing with the user to obtain usernames and credentials to be authenticated.

Jetty ships with the org.mortbay.jetty.plus.jaas.DefaultCallbackHandler which interfaces the information contained in the request to the Callbacks that are requested by LoginModules. You can replace this default with your own implementation if you have specific requirements not covered by the default.

Role Principal Implementation Class

When LoginModules authenticate a user, they usually also gather all of the roles that a user has and place them inside the JAAS Subject. As LoginModules are free to use their own implementation of the JAAS Principal to put into the Subject, jetty needs to know which Principals represent the user and which represent his/her roles when performing authorization checks on <security-constraint>s. The example LoginModules that ship with jetty all use the org.mortbay.jetty.plus.jaas.JAASRole class. However, if you have plugged in some other LoginModules, you must configure the classnames of their role Principal implementations.

Sample Login Modules

At the time of writing, Jetty provides four sample LoginModule implementations:

• org.mortbay.jetty.plus.jaas.spi.JDBCLoginModule
• org.mortbay.jetty.plus.jaas.spi.PropertyFileLoginModule
• org.mortbay.jetty.plus.jaas.spi.DataSourceLoginModule
• org.mortbay.jetty.plus.jaas.ldap.LdapLoginModule

We'll take a look at all of these, but first, a word about password handling in Jetty, as it applies to all LoginModules.

Passwords/Credentials

Passwords can be stored in clear text, obfuscated or checksummed. The class org.eclipse.jetty.http.security.Password should be used to generate all varieties of passwords,the output from which can be cut and pasted into property files or entered into database tables.

> java -cp lib/jetty.jar org.eclipse.jetty.http.security.Password
Usage - java org.eclipse.jetty.http.security.Password [<user>] <password>
> java -cp lib/jetty.jar org.eclipse.jetty.http.security.Password me you
you
OBF:20771x1b206z
MD5:639bae9ac6b3e1a84cebb7b403297b79
CRYPT:me/ks90E221EY

Read more on securing passwords.

JDBCLoginModule

The JDBCLoginModule stores user passwords and roles in a database that are accessed via JDBC calls. You can configure the JDBC connection information, as well as the names of the table and columns storing the username and credential, and the name of the table and columns storing the roles.

Here is an example login module configuration file entry for it using an HSQLDB driver:

jdbc {
         org.mortbay.jetty.plus.jaas.spi.JDBCLoginModule required
         debug="true"
         dbUrl="jdbc:hsqldb:."
         dbUserName="sa"
         dbDriver="org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver"
         userTable="myusers"
         userField="myuser"
         credentialField="mypassword"
         userRoleTable="myuserroles"
         userRoleUserField="myuser"
         userRoleRoleField="myrole";
     };

There is no particular schema required for the database tables storing the authentication and role information. The properties userTable, userField, credentialField, userRoleTable, userRoleUserField, userRoleRoleField configure the names of the tables and the columns within them that are used to format the following queries:

SELECT <credentialField> FROM <userTable> WHERE <userField> =?
SELECT <userRoleRoleField> FROM <userRoleTable> WHERE <userRoleUserField> =?

Credential and role information is lazily read from the database when a previously unauthenticated user requests authentication. Note that this information is only cached for the length of the authenticated session. When the user logs out or the session expires, the information is flushed from memory.

Note that passwords can be stored in the database in plain text or encoded formats, using the Jetty password utility.

DataSourceLoginModule

Similar to the JDBCLoginModule, but this LoginModule uses a DataSource to connect to the database instead of a jdbc driver. The DataSource is obtained by doing a jndi lookup on java:comp/env/$\{dnJNDIName\}

Here is a sample login module configuration for it:

ds {
       org.mortbay.jetty.plus.jaas.spi.DataSourceLoginModule required
       debug="true"
       dbJNDIName="ds"
       userTable="myusers"
       userField="myuser"
       credentialField="mypassword"
       userRoleTable="myuserroles"
       userRoleUserField="myuser"
       userRoleRoleField="myrole";
   };

PropertyFileLoginModule

With this login module implementation, the authentication and role information is read from a property file.

props {
          org.mortbay.jetty.plus.jaas.spi.PropertyFileLoginModule required
          debug="true"
          file="/somewhere/somefile.props";
      };

The file parameter is the location of a properties file of the same format as the etc/realm.properties example file. The format is:

<username>: <password>[,<rolename> ...]

Here's an example:

fred: OBF:1xmk1w261u9r1w1c1xmq,user,admin
harry: changeme,user,developer
tom: MD5:164c88b302622e17050af52c89945d44,user
dick: CRYPT:adpexzg3FUZAk,admin

The contents of the file are fully read in and cached in memory the first time a user requests authentication.

LdapLoginModule

Note that the LdapLoginModule ships in a separate jar, in $JETTY-HOME/lib/ext/jetty-ldap-jaas.jar. It requires JDK1.5 or above.

ldaploginmodule {
   org.mortbay.jetty.plus.jaas.spi.LdapLoginModule required
   debug="true"
   contextFactory="com.sun.jndi.ldap.LdapCtxFactory"
   hostname="ldap.example.com"
   port="389"
   bindDn="cn=Directory Manager"
   bindPassword="directory"
   authenticationMethod="simple"
   forceBindingLogin="false"
   userBaseDn="ou=people,dc=alcatel"
   userRdnAttribute="uid"
   userIdAttribute="uid"
   userPasswordAttribute="userPassword"
   userObjectClass="inetOrgPerson"
   roleBaseDn="ou=groups,dc=example,dc=com"
   roleNameAttribute="cn"
   roleMemberAttribute="uniqueMember"
   roleObjectClass="groupOfUniqueNames";
   };

Writing Your Own

If you want to implement your own custom LoginModule, there are two classes to be familiar with:

AbstractLoginModule.java
 
package org.mortbay.jetty.plus.jaas.spi;
 
public abstract class AbstractLoginModule implements LoginModule
{
  ...
  public abstract UserInfo getUserInfo (String username) throws Exception;
}

UserInfo.java
 
package org.mortbay.jetty.plus.jaas.spi;
 
public class UserInfo
{
 
  public UserInfo (String userName, Credential credential, List roleNames)
  {
    ...
  }
 
  public String getUserName()
  {
    ...
  }
 
  public List getRoleNames ()
  {
    ...
  }
 
  public boolean checkCredential (Object suppliedCredential)
  {
     ...
  }
}

The org.mortbay.jetty.plus.jaas.spi.AbstractLoginModule implements all of the javax.security.auth.spi.LoginModule methods. All you need to do is to implement the getUserInfo method to return a org.mortbay.jetty.plus.jaas.UserInfo instance which encapsulates the username, password and role names (note: as java.lang.Strings) for a user.

The AbstractLoginModule does not support any caching, so if you want to cache UserInfo (e.g. as does the org.mortbay.jetty.plus.jaas.spi.PropertyFileLoginModule) then you must provide this yourself.

Example JAAS WebApp

There is an example of authentication and web authorization in the jetty distribution in examples/test-jaas-webapp. It uses the PropertyFileLoginModule to perform authentication based on a simple properties file. To use it with the jetty maven plugin:

> cd examples/test-jaas-webapp
> mvn jetty:run

Alternatively, to use it instead with jetty standalone:

> cd examples/test-jaas-webapp
> mvn clean install
> cd ../../
> java -jar start.jar etc/jetty.xml etc/jetty-jaas.xml

Then surf to [1]

Other Goodies

RequestParameterCallback

As all servlet containers intercept and process a form submission with action j_security_check, it is usually not possible to insert any extra input fields onto a login form with which to perform authentication: you may only pass j_username and j_password. For those rare occasions when this is not good enough, and you require more information from the user in order to authenticate them, you can use the JAAS callback handler org.mortbay.jetty.plus.jaas.callback.RequestParameterCallback. This callback handler gives you access to all parameters that were passed in the form submission. To use it, in the login() method of your custom login module, add the RequestParameterCallback to the list of callback handlers the login module uses, tell it which params you are interested in, and then get the value of the parameter back. Here's an example:

FooLoginModule.java
 
public class FooLoginModule extends AbstractLoginModule
{
        .
        .
        .
 
     public boolean login()
        throws LoginException
     {
        .
        .
        .
        Callback[] callbacks = new Callback[3];
        callbacks[0] = new NameCallback();
        callbacks[1] = new ObjectCallback();
 
        //as an example, look for a param named "extrainfo" in the request
        //use one RequestParameterCallback() instance for each param you want to access
        callbacks[2] = new RequestParameterCallback ();
        ((RequestParameterCallback)callbacks[2]).setParameterName ("extrainfo");
        .
        .
        .
        callbackHandler.handle(callbacks);
        String userName = ((NameCallback)callbacks[0]).getName();
        Object pwd = ((ObjectCallback)callbacks[1]).getObject();
        List paramValues = ((RequestParameterCallback)callbacks[2]).getParameterValues();
 
        //use the userName, pwd and the value(s) of the parameter named "extrainfo" to
        //authenticate the user
        .
        .
        .
     }