A security-domain can only load login-modules from a single JBoss module. Even though the security-domain configuration will allow each login module defined within a single security-domain to have a "module" attribute, the only module that is used to load the login-modules is the last "module" attribute that the parsing system locates.

For example, with the following configuration, it looks like "org.jboss.example.CustomLoginModule" should be loaded from the "org.jboss.example" jboss-module and "org.jboss.example.CustomBaseCertLoginModule" should be loaded from the "org.jboss.another.example" jboss-module:

<security-domain name="jmx-console" cache-type="default">
<authentication>
<login-module code="org.jboss.example.CustomLoginModule" module="org.jboss.example" flag="required">
<module-option name="usersProperties" value="${jboss.server.config.dir}/users.properties"/>
<module-option name="rolesProperties" value="${jboss.server.config.dir}/roles.properties"/>
</login-module>
<login-module code="org.jboss.example.CustomBaseCertLoginModule" module="org.jboss.another.example" flag="required">
<module-option name="usersProperties" value="${jboss.server.config.dir}/users.properties"/>
<module-option name="rolesProperties" value="${jboss.server.config.dir}/roles.properties"/>
</login-module>

</authentication>
</security-domain>

Unfortunately, it does not work like this. Only the "org.jboss.another.example" jboss-module is used to load the custom login modules.

There seems to be two issues. 1) The security subsystem code only "remembers" the last module that is defined within a single security domain. 2) I think issue #1 is happening because the JBoss authentication code (org.jboss.security.authentication.JBossCachedAuthenticationManager.authenticate()) defers to the JVM's login module handling code. The JVM appears to treat the login modules as one atomic until and so a single classloader is set and then the JVM login module code is invoked to handle the authentication requests.