WildFly Security Realms
External
- RedHat Documentation Security Guide https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/JBoss_Enterprise_Application_Platform/6.3/html-single/Security_Guide/index.html#chap-Security_Realms
- jboss.org Security Realms Article https://docs.jboss.org/author/display/AS71/Security+Realms
Internal
Overview
A security realm is a WildFly-specific identity store of usernames, passwords and group membership information that can be used to authenticate users of the management interfaces, web applications and EJBs.
The security realm contains mappings between users and passwords, and users and roles - a mechanism for adding authentication and authorization to applications and JBoss management facilities and regular applications.
By default WildFly comes pre-configured with two realms:
Both of these use filesystem-based stores for users and group membership, and use a digest mechanism by default when authenticating.
New security realms can be configured. See Adding a New Security Realm.
The existing security realms can be reconfigured to use other authentication mechanisms, different from digest.
Security realms are not involved in any authorization decisions, however they can be configured to load a user's group membership information, which then can be subsequently used to make authorization decisions. The user is authenticated first, then the group membership information is loaded as part of a second step.
The management interfaces and the associates security realms are loaded as core services.
For a better upper level picture of WildFly security, see WildFly Security Concepts.