It's important to understand some of the most important Spring Security terminologies. Let's look at some of them:
- Principal: Any user, device, or system (application) that would like to interact with your application.
- Authentication: A process by which your application makes sure that the principal is who they claim to be.
- Credentials: When a principal tries to interact with your application, the authentication process kicks in and challenges the principal to pass on some values. One such example is a username/password combination and these values are called credentials. The authentication process validates the principal's passed-in credentials against a data store and replies back with the appropriate result. ...