Magnolia CMS uses Sun's Java SE Security (JAAS). JAAS creates two distinct processes for:

• username and password request, and
• authentication and authorization.

Although possible to use other servlets, the default engine is Tomcat. Configuration is done in WEB-INF/config/jaas.config file:

magnolia {info.magnolia.jaas.sp.jcr.JCRAuthenticationModule requisite;
  info.magnolia.jaas.sp.jcr.JCRAuthorizationModule required;};

The default configuration uses two classes: 

• one for user login and password authentication, and
• one for authorization of user and password.

Each of these classes extend:

You can use this framework to implement your own login logic.

Login Procedure

The following (simplified login) procedure assumes you have two JAAS modules configured:

•   When a user logs in to Magnolia CMS, all configured JAAS modules try to authenticate the user by calling the login() method. 
  
  
• The method throws an {{LoginException }} if the login fails authentication. Since
  $webResourceManager.requireResource("info.magnolia.sys.confluence.artifact-info-plugin:javadoc-resource-macro-resources") AbstractLoginModule
    provides the {{login()}}method, a JAAS module only has to implement a validateUser() method.
  
  
• When the user successfully authenticated, the commit() method of all JAAS modules is called.

login()

The login() authentication method of

The second module's login authorization method is only called if the user has been properly verified. Therefore the login() authorization method of 

commit()

The commit() method includes the values from both authentication and authorization. The authentication module provides all user properties, while the authorization module adds the roles and groups and the respective ACLs to the user object.

Example

Assume that you want to store users outside of Magnolia, for example in LDAP or a database. If a user is not available in the external system, the Magnolia user management system will be used. What do we have to implement for this?

User Object

Magnolia uses

to represent users stored in the users repository. Since our example users are not going to primarily have representation in the Magnolia repository, we have to create a new user class implementing

JAAS Module

The simplest way to accomplish our example and support both an external user information storage system as well as the Magnolia repository is to create a JAAS module extending

and just modify the following two methods:

public void validateUser() throws LoginException {

        this.user = authenticate(this.name, this.pswd);

	if (this.user == null) {
            throw new FailedLoginException("User not found or password incorrect");
        }
	if (this.user.getAllGroups() != null) {
		this.setGroupNames((Set)this.user.getAllGroups());
	}
	if (this.user.getAllRoles() != null) {
		this.setRoleNames((Set) this.user.getAllRoles());
	}
    }
    public void setEntity() {
        EntityImpl user = new EntityImpl();
        user.addProperty(Entity.LANGUAGE, this.user.getLanguage());
        user.addProperty(Entity.NAME, this.user.getName());
        user.addProperty(Entity.PASSWORD, new String(this.pswd));
        this.subject.getPrincipals().add(user);
    }

Even with this modification the authentication method must be implemented as well in order to properly create a User object.

jaas.config

Now we have to add our new JAAS module to the JAAS configuration. Since we want Magnolia to be the secondary user management method used, we put the new module first with the sufficient modifier:

magnolia {
  my.project.ExternalJAASModule sufficient;
  info.magnolia.jaas.sp.jcr.JCRAuthenticationModule requisite;
  info.magnolia.jaas.sp.jcr.JCRAuthorizationModule required;
};