[JCR-3717] Inconsistent Principal Validation between API and Import behavior

• Type: Bug
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Duplicate
• Affects Version/s: 2.7.3
• Component/s: security
• Assignee: Tobias Bocanegra
• Reporter: Tobias Bocanegra
• Created: 23/Jan/14 06:20
• Updated: 18/Dec/19 12:42
• Resolved: 12/Aug/14 10:32

Description

the JCR access control management mandates that adding a new ACE includes validating if the specified principal is known to the repository.

however, the ac-importer in jackrabbit is more relaxed wrt that validation and allows to create ACE even for unknown principals. this basically leaves us with an inconsistent behavior between xml-import and calls to ac-management API directly.

also note, that principal validation is only done when applying and ACL but not when removing a principal.

in order to fix that i would suggest the following approach:

• add a new configuration parameter to the ACLProvider: "allow-unknown-principals"
• make the import behavior independent of the principal manager
• respect this configuration when checking the ACL templates

this will change the default behavior of the XML import of access controlled content. if this is a problem for backward compatibility, we can additionally add a "importBehavior" property to the ACL importer that has a "besteffort" mode where the principals check is bypassed (as in the current implementation)