AS7/EAP6 : Custom Authenticator Valves - Writing and Configuring

Version 1

Created by abn on Sep 5, 2012 5:06 AM. Last modified by abn on Sep 5, 2012 5:46 AM.

Configuring Valves

Valves can be configured in AS7/EAP6 in an application's jboss-web.xml file by adding the following to the <jboss-web> element where "org.jboss.security.negotiation.NegotiationAuthenticator" can be replaced with the desired Valve.[1]

<valve>
    <class-name>org.jboss.security.negotiation.NegotiationAuthenticator</class-name>
</valve>

Another example using a custom authenticator valve:

<valve> 
    <class-name>org.jboss.web.tomcat.security.GenericHeaderAuthenticator</class-name>
    <param>
        <param-name>httpHeaderForSSOAuth</param-name>
        <param-value>sm_ssoid,ct-remote-user,HTTP_OBLIX_UID</param-value>
    </param>
    <param>
        <param-name>sessionCookieForSSOAuth</param-name>
        <param-value>SMSESSION,CTSESSION,ObSSOCookie</param-value>
    </param>
</valve>

Note that here we added additional configuration using the <param> element, which is similar to the <attribute> element used in previous versions when configuring valves using context.xml file.

Writing Custom Authenticators

Custom authenticators can be written by either implementing the Authenticator Interface [2] or extending already implemented Authenticators [3]. An example of the later is detailed by Anil Saldhana in his community post [4]. However, due to changes in jboss-web, in AS7/EAP6 the authenticate() method's signature has changed [2,5]. This is important to note when porting the code at [4] or any old custom authenticators to AS7/EAP6.

The required signature for the authenticate() method is:

public boolean authenticate(Request request, HttpServletResponse response)
        throws IOException, ServletException;

The modified version of an extended custom authenticator valve from [4] is provided in the attachment GenericHeaderAuthenticator.java.zip, which extends the ExtendedFormAuthenticator class.

An example of using this custom authenticator is provided here. We base this example on the AS7/EAP6 quick-start "servlet-security". The source code is provided in the attached file servlet-security-custom.zip and the war is attached as jboss-as-servlet-security.war. The changes that were made are as follows:

Modified dependencies in pom.xml
Added org.jboss.web.tomcat.security.GenericHeaderAuthenticator
Modified WEB-INF/jboss-web.xml
Added <form-login-config> to WEB-INF/web.xml as we are are using a form based authentication here
Added login.html, error.html for form based authentication

To deploy this webapp,