SSO, Pre Authentication & Spring Security 2.0.x

The Spring Security 2.0.x documentation does a great job of explaining:

• how the pre-authentication concept ties in with SSO systems,
• what classes are offered out-of-the-box,
• and how to configure them

but it doesn't explicitly state how the the preAuthN Provider is reading the authentication data accumulated by the preAuthN Filters.

One would imagine that there would be a default UserDetailService implementation as well, which can be configured with the preAuthN Provider but if you go looking into the UserDetail package summary, there is no such thing.

What to do? Well if we look closer, the AuthenticationUserDetailsService interface in the org.springframework.security.userdetails package is implemented by PreAuthenticatedGrantedAuthoritiesUserDetailsService which sits in the org.springframework.security.providers.preauth package.

This works out well but the spring documentation offers a "Siteminder Example Configuration" where they place the UserDetailsByNameServiceWrapper inside the preAUthN user details service and PreAuthenticatedGrantedAuthoritiesUserDetailsService is nowhere to be seen ... so it can seem a bit confusing as to how it should be used or where it should be specified.

I found my a clue through this forum entry and apparently PreAuthenticatedGrantedAuthoritiesUserDetailsService can be specified as the class attribute of the preAuthenticatedUserDetailsService property ... and the use of an UserDetailService is strictly optional depending on whether or not one needs to pull anymore information about the user.

That's all folks, hope this sends you on your way to a successful integration.