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Date: Mon, 10 Sep 2012 20:58:25 +0530
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Subject: Improving Jackrabbit integration with OSGi - JAAS
From: Chetan Mehrotra <chetan.mehrotra@gmail.com>
To: dev@jackrabbit.apache.org
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Jackrabbit relies on JAAS to perform principal authentication. However
using JAAS in OSGi environment is often tricky because of classloading
issues. I have done a poc to get JAAS work better in OSGi env. The
relevant changes done in Sling and Jackrabbit are available at Git
fork [1] and [6]. It involved adding a new JAAS support bundle in
Sling and using new ConfigurationSpi [2] support added in JDK 1.6 .
For this to work some changes were done in Jackrabbit code to make use
of the new feature. For complete details refer to wiki entry at [3]
and code diff [5]

At high level following changes were done in Jackrabbit
* Make use of new method
Configuration.getInstance(ConfigAlgoName,InputParams,ProviderName) to
obtain JAAS config in JAASAuthContext class to fetch configuration
* Expose a new attribute jaasConfigProviderName in Security element of
repository configuration.

With these changes done it would be possible to plugin in custom JAAS
LoginModules without using fragment. Instead the usual way of
extending the AbstractLoginModule can be used. Also it would be
possible to make use of various features provided by OSGi env like
dynamic configuration updates, dependency injection etc.

It would be helpful to have such a feature be part of JR Core. Thoughts?

Chetan Mehrotra

[1] https://github.com/chetanmeh/jackrabbit/tree/jaas-osgi
[2] http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/javax/security/auth/login/ConfigurationSpi.html
[3] https://github.com/chetanmeh/c/wiki/Jaas-in-OSGi-with-Jackrabbit-and-Sling
[4] http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/javax/security/auth/login/Configuration.html#getInstance(java.lang.String,%20javax.security.auth.login.Configuration.Parameters,%20java.lang.String)
[5] https://github.com/chetanmeh/jackrabbit/compare/jaas-osgi
[6] https://github.com/chetanmeh/sling/tree/jaas-osgi
[7] https://github.com/chetanmeh/jackrabbit/compare/jaas-osgi.patch