My company has been evaluating Spring MVC to determine if we should use it in one of our next projects. So far I love what I\'ve seen, and right now I\'m taking a look at th
Using a static in this case is the best way to write secure code.
Yes, statics are generally bad - generally, but in this case, the static is what you want. Since the security context associates a Principal with the currently running thread, the most secure code would access the static from the thread as directly as possible. Hiding the access behind a wrapper class that is injected provides an attacker with more points to attack. They wouldn't need access to the code (which they would have a hard time changing if the jar was signed), they just need a way to override the configuration, which can be done at runtime or slipping some XML onto the classpath. Even using annotation injection would be overridable with external XML. Such XML could inject the running system with a rogue principal.