related to auth constraint

[Chetan Raju]

<security-constraint>
<web-resource-collection>
<web-resource-name>Sensitive</web-resource-name>
<url-pattern>/SecuredServlet</url-pattern>
</web-resource-collection>
<auth-constraint>
</auth-constraint>
<role-name>manager</role-name>
</security-constraint>
 
<security-constraint>
<web-resource-collection>
<web-resource-name>Sensitive</web-resource-name>
<url-pattern>/SecuredServlet</url-pattern>
</web-resource-collection>
<auth-constraint>
<role-name>*</role-name>
</auth-constraint>
</security-constraint>

a. It is faulty becasue it has multiple security-constraint elements
b. It is faulty because it does not supply the http-method tag
c. Only members of the manager role will be able to access theresource
d. Any user will be able to access the resource
e. No users will be able to access the resource

The answer turned out to be e. However, I thought it should be d. Can anyone clarify ?

[Ulf Dittmer]

Chapter SRV.12.8 of the Servlet 2.4 specification covers this. In particular "An authorization constraint that names no roles indicates that access to the constrained requests must not be permitted under any circumstances." and in SRV.12.8.1 you'll find that "The special case of an authorization constraint that names no roles shall combine with any other constraints to override their affects and cause access to be precluded."

However, it seems that in the past this was not always implemented corrrectly by Tomcat (which is the reference implementation for the Servlet Spec); see here.

Also, if you post questions like these, please QuoteYourSources.

[Chetan Raju]

The source is Marcus Greens site at http://www.examulator.com/moodle.