SES-69: Data returned from SAMLUserDetailsService and UserDetailsService put into different fields of the Authentication object

[spring-projects-issues]

Mandus Elfving (Migrated from SES-69) said:

We are using SAML for our production environment and username & password authentication for development. In production we an implementation of SAMLUserDetailsService to get information about the user and in development we use the corresponding functionality by implementing UserDetailsService (both return the same kind of object with information about the user). However the result returned from these two services is put in to different fields of the Authentication object depending on the authentication scheme used. When using SAML the object is put in to the details field and when using username & password authentication it is put into the principal field.

This makes it hard to have the same code to get at the object returned from the SAMLUserDetailsService/UserDetailsService as we have to know which authentication scheme was used. My personal opinion is that the SAML module should behave as the username & password authentication and put the data in the principal field.

[spring-projects-issues]

GWA said:

It's true this is a little odd compare to all other authentication provider I know

Anyway, in the SAMLAuthenticationProvider there's a comment on the getPrincipal method that insist that the method can be override

In your project you can declare a provider like this one instead of the vanilla SAMLAuthenticationProvider. This will do exactly what you need.

public class PersonalSamlAuthenticationProvider extends SAMLAuthenticationProvider{

/**
 * 
 * @param consumer
 */
public PersonalSamlAuthenticationProvider(WebSSOProfileConsumer consumer) {
    super(consumer);
}

/* (non-Javadoc)
 * @see org.springframework.security.saml.SAMLAuthenticationProvider#getPrincipal(org.springframework.security.saml.SAMLCredential, java.lang.Object)
 */
@Override
protected Object getPrincipal(SAMLCredential credential, Object userDetail) {
    if (userDetail!=null){
        return userDetail;
    }
    return super.getPrincipal(credential, userDetail);
}

}

[spring-projects-issues]

Mandus Elfving said:

I am aware that you can always override the authentication provider, but it seems a bit odd that the SAML extension behaves in a way that isn't consistent with the other authentication methods.Therefore I think it should be considered to change the SAML extension to behave as the others do.

[spring-projects-issues]

Vladimir Schäfer said:

Behavior of principal field is now identical to AbstractUserDetailsAuthenticationProvider. By default userDetail object is now put to the principal field of the Authentication object. Previous behavior can be enabled by setting property forcePrincipalAsString to true on the SAMLAuthenticationProvider.