Raymond K. Ng

Introduced in 1995, Java has firmly established itself as a mature mainstream programming language for enterprises. The Java platform security model has evolved over the years to meet new requirements, and today enterprise Java developers have a large number of APIs and services to choose from to fulfill their security needs. Originally touted as a secure runtime environment for downloadable executables (applets), Java platform security received a lot of attention early on and the rather inflexible security model was quickly identified as a weakness in the system. With the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE), Sun revamped the Java platform security model and introduced a fine-grained, flexible, and extensible security model for code-based security. This new model has largely been a success but it was restricted to code-based security. This makes sense for br... (more)

JAAS in the Enterprise

Since 2001 when Java Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS) was formally included in the Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE) 1.3 platform specification, the J2EE community has been grappling with the issue of JAAS/J2EE integration. On the surface, JAAS seems to be an excellent complement to J2EE: JAAS defines a pluggable Application Programming Interface (API) for authentication modules and a fine-grained Subject-based authorization model, which are both lacking in the existing J2EE security model. Since JAAS is officially part of the J2EE platform specification, i... (more)