Authority service

The authority service is responsible for:

• Creating and deleting authorities
• Querying for authorities
• Structuring authorities into hierarchies
• Supporting queries for membership
• Finding all the authorities that apply to the current authenticated user
• Determining if the current authenticated user has admin rights
• Managing zones and the assignment of authorities to zones

The default implementation allows a list of group names to define both administration groups and guest groups. Each authentication component defines its own default administrative user(s), which can also be set explicitly. The default service is defined in the authority-services-context.xml file.