Configuring Alternative Authentication Providers

One of Spring Security’s strongest points is that you can plug different authentication mechanisms into the framework. Spring Security was built to create, as much as possible, a pluggable architecture model where different things can be plugged into the framework easily and unobtrusively. In the authentication layer, an abstraction exists that takes care of this part of the security process. This abstraction comes mainly in the form of the AuthenticationProvider interface, but specific security servlet filters and user details services also support it.