The SecurityManager lies at the heart of Shiro’s architecture. While the Subject represents security functionality and state for a single application user, the SecurityManager
performs security operations and manages state for all application users.
Because Shiro’s API encourages a Subject
-centric programming approach, most application developers will rarely, if ever, interact with the SecurityManager
directly (framework developers however might sometimes find it useful). Even so, it is still important to know how the SecurityManager
functions, especially when configuring one for an application.
As stated previously, the application’s SecurityManager
performs security operations and manages state for all application users. In Shiro’s default SecurityManager
implementations, this includes:
But this is a lot of functionality to try to manage in a single component. And, making these things flexible and customizable would be very difficult if everything were lumped into a single implementation class.
To simplify configuration and enable flexible configuration/pluggability, Shiro’s implementations are all highly modular in design - so modular in fact, that the SecurityManager implementation (and its class-hierarchy) does not do much at all. Instead, the SecurityManager
implementations mostly act as a lightweight ‘container’ component, delegating almost all behavior to nested/wrapped components.
To simplify the SecurityManager
implementation complexity and allow for pluggable behavior, the Shiro SecurityManager
implementations delegate almost all logic to a nested set of modular components that actually perform the necessary functionality. While the components actually execute the logic, the SecurityManager
implementation knows how and when to coordinate the components for the correct behavior.
The nested components that the SecurityManager
coordinates and delegates to are:
org.apache.shiro.authc.Authenticator
)org.apache.shiro.authz.Authorizer
)org.apache.shiro.session.mgt.SessionManager
)org.apache.shiro.cache.CacheManager
)org.apache.shiro.mgt.RememberMeManager
)org.apache.shiro.mgt.SubjectFactory
)The SecurityManager
implementations and are also JavaBeans compatible, which allows you (or a configuration mechanism) to easily customize the pluggable components via standard JavaBeans accessor/mutator methods (get*/set*). This means the Shiro’s architectural modularity can translate into very easy configuration for custom behavior.
SecurityManager
with custom components via any mechanism that supports JavaBeans-style configuration, such as Spring, Guice, JBoss, etc.’)The absolute simplest way to create a SecurityManager and make it available to the application is to create a org.apache.shiro.mgt.DefaultSecurityManager
and wire it up in code:
Realm realm = //instantiate or acquire a Realm instance. We'll discuss Realms later.
SecurityManager securityManager = new DefaultSecurityManager(realm);
//Make the SecurityManager instance available to the entire application:
SecurityUtils.setSecurityManager(securityManager);
Surprisingly, after only 3 lines of code, you now have a fully functional Shiro environment suitable for most applications. How easy was that!?
You could additionally call any of the SecurityManager
instance’s setter methods with custom implementations of the nested components listed above to fully customize its behavior.
But, as simple as programmatic customization is, these 3 lines of code do not represent the ideal configuration for most real world applications. There are a few reasons why programmatic configuration may not be suitable for your application:
SecurityUtils.setSecurityManager
method call makes the instantiated SecurityManager
instance a VM static singleton, which, while fine for many applications, would cause problems if more than one Shiro-enabled application was running on the same JVM. It could be better if the instance was an application singleton, but not a static memory reference.Most applications instead benefit from text-based configuration that could be modified independently of source code and even make things easier to understand for those not intimately familiar with Shiro’s APIs.
Shiro provides a simple INI-based configuration that can be used out of the box, but any other JavaBeans-compatible mechanism can be used as well. For example, Shiro has excellent Spring support too. Other similar frameworks (Guice, JBoss, etc) could also be used.