This tutorial expands the program and policy file developed in the JAAS Authentication tutorial to demonstrate the JAAS authorization component, which ensures the authenticated caller has the access control rights (permissions) required to do subsequent security-sensitive operations. Since the authorization component requires that the user authentication first be completed, please read the JAAS Authentication tutorial first if you have not already done so.
The rest of this tutorial consists of the following sections:
If you want to first see the tutorial code in action, you can skip directly to Running the Authorization Tutorial Code and then go back to the other sections to learn more.
JAAS authorization extends the existing Java security
architecture that uses a security policy to specify what access rights
are granted to executing code. That architecture, introduced in the
Java 2 platform, is code-centric. That is, the permissions
are granted based on code characteristics: where the code is coming
from and whether it is digitally signed and if so by whom. We saw
an example of this in the sampleacn.policy file used
in the JAAS Authentication
tutorial. That file contains the following:
grant codebase "file:./SampleAcn.jar" {
permission javax.security.auth.AuthPermission
"createLoginContext.Sample";
};
This grants the code in the SampleAcn.jar file,
located in the current directory, the specified permission. (No
signer is specified, so it doesn't matter whether the code is
signed or not.)
JAAS authorization augments the existing code-centric access controls with new user-centric access controls. Permissions can be granted based not just on what code is running but also on who is running it.
When an application uses JAAS authentication to authenticate the user (or other entity such as a service), a Subject is created as a result. The purpose of the Subject is to represent the authenticated user. A Subject is comprised of a set of Principals, where each Principal represents an identity for that user. For example, a Subject could have a name Principal ("Susan Smith") and a Social Security Number Principal ("987-65-4321"), thereby distinguishing this Subject from other Subjects.
Permissions can be granted in the policy to specific Principals. After the user has been authenticated, the application can associate the Subject with the current access control context. For each subsequent security-checked operation (a local file access, for example), the Java runtime will automatically determine whether the policy grants the required permission only to a specific Principal and if so, the operation will be allowed only if the Subject associated with the access control context contains the designated Principal.
To make JAAS authorization take place, the following is required:
Policy file
grant statements can now optionally include one or
more Principal fields. Inclusion of a Principal field indicates
that the user or other entity represented by the specified
Principal, executing the specified code, has the designated
permissions.
Thus, the basic format of a grant statement is
now
grant <signer(s) field>, <codeBase URL>
<Principal field(s)> {
permission perm_class_name "target_name", "action";
....
permission perm_class_name "target_name", "action";
};
where each of the signer, codeBase and Principal fields is optional
and the order between the fields doesn't matter.
A Principal field looks like the following:
Principal Principal_class "principal_name"
That is, it is the word "Principal" (where case doesn't matter) followed by the (fully qualified) name of a Principal class and a principal name.
A Principal class is a class that implements the java.security.Principal
interface. All Principal objects have an associated name that can
be obtained by calling their getName method. The
format used for the name is dependent on each Principal
implementation.
The type of Principal placed in the Subject created by the basic
authentication mechanism used by this tutorial is
SamplePrincipal, so that is what should be used as the
Principal_class part of our grant
statement's Principal designation. User names for
SamplePrincipals are of the form "name", and
the only user name accepted for this tutorial is "testUser", so the
principal_name designation to use in the
grant statement is "testUser".
It is possible to include more than one Principal field in a
grant statement. If multiple Principal fields are
specified, then the permissions in that grant
statement are granted only if the Subject associated with the
current access control context contains all of those
Principals.
To grant the same set of permissions to different Principals,
create multiple grant statements where each lists the
permissions and contains a single Principal field designating one
of the Principals.
The policy file for this tutorial includes one
grant statement with a Principal field:
grant codebase "file:./SampleAction.jar",
Principal sample.principal.SamplePrincipal "testUser" {
permission java.util.PropertyPermission "java.home", "read";
permission java.util.PropertyPermission "user.home", "read";
permission java.io.FilePermission "foo.txt", "read";
};
This specifies that the indicated permissions are granted to the
specified principal executing the code in
SampleAction.jar. (Note: the SamplePrincipal class is
in the sample.principal package.)
To create and associate a Subject with the current access control context, you need the following:
doAs method from the Subject class must
be called, passing it an authenticated Subject and a java.security.PrivilegedAction
or java.security.PrivilegedExceptionAction.
(See API for Privileged
Blocks for a comparison of PrivilegedAction and
PrivilegedExceptionAction.) The doAs method associates
the provided Subject with the current access control context and
then invokes the run method from the action. The
run method implementation contains all the code to be
executed as the specified Subject. The action thus executes as the
specified Subject.
The static doAsPrivileged method from the Subject
class may be called instead of the doAs method, as
will be done for this tutorial. In addition to the parameters
passed to doAs, doAsPrivileged requires a
third parameter: an AccessControlContext. Unlike doAs,
which associates the provided Subject with the current access
control context, doAsPrivileged associates the Subject
with the provided access control context or with an empty access
control context if the parameter passed in is null, as
is the case for this tutorial. See doAs vs. doAsPrivileged in the
JAAS Reference Guide for a comparison of those methods.
The code for this tutorial consists of four files:
SampleAcn.java application file from the JAAS Authentication tutorial except for
the additional code needed to call
Subject.doAsPrivileged.run method that contains all the code we want to be
executed with Principal-based authorization checks.The SampleLoginModule.java and
SamplePrincipal.java files were also used in the
JAAS Authentication tutorial, so
they are not described further here. The other source files are
described below.
Like SampleAcn, the SampleAzn class
instantiates a LoginContext lc and calls its
login method to perform the authentication. If
successful, the authenticated Subject (which includes a
SamplePrincipal representing the user) is obtained by calling the
LoginContext's getSubject method:
Subject mySubject = lc.getSubject();
After providing the user some information about the Subject,
such as which Principals it has, the main method then
calls Subject.doAsPrivileged, passing it the
authenticated Subject mySubject, a PrivilegedAction
(SampleAction) and a null AccessControlContext, as
described in the following.
The SampleAction class is instantiated via the following:
PrivilegedAction action = new SampleAction();
The call to Subject.doAsPrivileged is performed
via:
Subject.doAsPrivileged(mySubject, action, null);
The doAsPrivileged method invokes execution of the
run method in the PrivilegedAction action
(SampleAction) to initiate execution of the rest of the code, which
is considered to be executed on behalf of the Subject
mySubject.
Passing null as the AccessControlContext (third)
argument to doAsPrivileged indicates that
mySubject should be associated with a new empty
AccessControlContext. The result is that security checks occurring
during execution of SampleAction will only require permissions for
the SampleAction code itself (or other code it invokes), running as
mySubject. Note that the caller of
doAsPrivileged (and the callers on the execution stack
at the time doAsPrivileged was called) do not require
any permissions while the action executes.
SampleAction.java contains the
SampleAction class. This class implements
java.security.PrivilegedAction and has a
run method that contains all the code we want to be
executed as the Subject mySubject. For this tutorial,
we will perform three operations, each of which cannot be done
unless code has been granted required permissions. We will:
java.home system
property,user.home system
property, andfoo.txt
exists in the current directory.Here is the code:
package sample;
import java.io.File;
import java.security.PrivilegedAction;
public class SampleAction implements PrivilegedAction {
public Object run() {
System.out.println("\nYour java.home property value is: "
+ System.getProperty("java.home"));
System.out.println("\nYour user.home property value is: "
+ System.getProperty("user.home"));
File f = new File("foo.txt");
System.out.print("\nfoo.txt does ");
if (!f.exists())
System.out.print("not ");
System.out.println("exist in the current working directory.");
return null;
}
}
The login configuration file used for this tutorial can be exactly the same as that used by the JAAS Authentication tutorial. Thus we can use sample_jaas.config, which contains just one entry:
Sample {
sample.module.SampleLoginModule required debug=true;
};
This entry is named "Sample" and that is the name that both our
tutorial applications SampleAcn and
SampleAzn use to refer to it. The entry specifies that
the LoginModule to be used to do the user authentication is the
SampleLoginModule in the sample.module package and
that this SampleLoginModule is required to "succeed" in order for
authentication to be considered successful. The SampleLoginModule
succeeds only if the name and password supplied by the user are the
one it expects ("testUser" and "testPassword", respectively).
The SampleLoginModule also defines a "debug" option that can be
set to true as shown. If this option is set to
true, SampleLoginModule outputs extra information
about the progress of authentication.
The application for this authorization tutorial consists of two
classes, SampleAzn and SampleAction. The
code in each class contains some security-sensitive operations and
thus relevant permissions are required in a policy file in order
for the operations to be executed.
The LoginModule used by this tutorial,
SampleLoginModule, also contains an operation
requiring a permission.
The permissions required by each of these classes are described below, followed by a link to the full policy file.
The main method of the SampleAzn class does two
operations for which permissions are required. It
doAsPrivileged static method of the
Subject class.The LoginContext creation is exactly the same as was done in the
authentication tutorial, and it thus needs the same
javax.security.auth.AuthPermission permission with
target "createLoginContext.Sample".
In order to call the doAsPrivileged method of the
Subject class, you need to have a
javax.security.auth.AuthPermission with target
"doAsPrivileged".
Assuming the SampleAzn class is placed in a JAR
file named SampleAzn.jar, these permissions can be
granted to the SampleAzn code via the following
grant statement in the policy file:
grant codebase "file:./SampleAzn.jar" {
permission javax.security.auth.AuthPermission
"createLoginContext.Sample";
permission javax.security.auth.AuthPermission "doAsPrivileged";
};
The SampleAction code does three operations for
which permissions are required. It
foo.txt
exists in the current directory.The permissions required for these operations are the following:
permission java.util.PropertyPermission "java.home", "read"; permission java.util.PropertyPermission "user.home", "read"; permission java.io.FilePermission "foo.txt", "read";
We need to grant these permissions to the code in
SampleAction.class, which we will place in a JAR file
named SampleAction.jar. However, for this particular
grant statement we want to grant the permissions not
just to the code but to a specific user executing the code,
to demonstrate how to restrict access to a particular user.
Thus, as explained in How Do You Make
Principal-Based Policy File Statements?, our grant
statement looks like the following:
grant codebase "file:./SampleAction.jar",
Principal sample.principal.SamplePrincipal "testUser" {
permission java.util.PropertyPermission "java.home", "read";
permission java.util.PropertyPermission "user.home", "read";
permission java.io.FilePermission "foo.txt", "read";
};
The SampleLoginModule code does one operation for
which permissions are required. It needs a
javax.security.auth.AuthPermission with target
"modifyPrincipals" in order to populate a Subject with a Principal.
The grant statement is the following:
grant codebase "file:./SampleLM.jar" {
permission javax.security.auth.AuthPermission "modifyPrincipals";
};
The full policy file is sampleazn.policy.
To execute our JAAS authorization tutorial code, all you have to do is
sample):
sample.module):
sample.principal):
javac sample/SampleAction.java sample/SampleAzn.java sample/module/SampleLoginModule.java sample/principal/SamplePrincipal.java(Type all that on one line.)
SampleAzn.jar containing
SampleAzn.class and
MyCallbackHandler.class (Note the sources for both
these classes are in SampleAzn.java):
jar -cvf SampleAzn.jar sample/SampleAzn.class sample/MyCallbackHandler.class
(Type all that on one line.)
SampleAction.jar
containing SampleAction.class:
jar -cvf SampleAction.jar sample/SampleAction.class
SampleLoginModule.class and
SamplePrincipal.class:
jar -cvf SampleLM.jar sample/module/SampleLoginModule.class sample/principal/SamplePrincipal.class
SampleAzn application, specifying
-classpath clause that classes
should be searched for in the SampleAzn.jar,
SampleAction.jar, and SampleLM.jar JAR
files,-Djava.security.manager that a security manager
should be installed,-Djava.security.policy==sampleazn.policy that
the policy file to be used is sampleazn.policy,
and-Djava.security.auth.login.config==sample_jaas.config
that the login configuration file to be used is
sample_jaas.config.Below are the full commands to use for both Microsoft Windows and Solaris, Linux, and Mac OS X systems. The only difference is that on Windows systems you use semicolons to separate classpath items, while you use colons for that purpose on Solaris, Linux, and Mac OS X systems.
Here is the full command for Windows systems:
java -classpath SampleAzn.jar;SampleAction.jar;SampleLM.jar -Djava.security.manager -Djava.security.policy==sampleazn.policy -Djava.security.auth.login.config==sample_jaas.config sample.SampleAzn
Here is the full command for Solaris, Linux, and Mac OS X systems:
java -classpath SampleAzn.jar:SampleAction.jar:SampleLM.jar -Djava.security.manager -Djava.security.policy==sampleazn.policy -Djava.security.auth.login.config==sample_jaas.config sample.SampleAzn
Type the full command on one line. Multiple lines are used here for legibility. If the command is too long for your system, you may need to place it in a .bat file (for Windows) or a .sh file (for Solaris, Linux, and Mac OS X) and then run that file to execute the command.
You will be prompted for a user name and password (use "testUser" and "testPassword"), and the SampleLoginModule specified in the login configuration file will check the name and password. If your login is successful, you will see the message "Authentication succeeded!" and if not, you will see "Authentication failed:" followed by a reason for the failure.
Once authentication is successfully completed, the rest of the
program (in SampleAction) will be executed on behalf
of you, the user, requiring you to have been granted appropriate
permissions. The sampleazn.policy policy file grants
you the required permissions, so you will see a display of the
values of your java.home and user.home
system properties and a statement as to whether or not you have a
file named foo.txt in the current directory.
