On the latest post on his site Joshua Thijssen has kicked off a series taking a deep dive into the Symfony security component, a key piece in the security of Symfony-based applications. In this first part of the series he introduces the component and starts in on some of the features it offers.

Once in a while I like diving into code and see how things work under the hood. And as the symfony2 framework consists of many different components, bundles and bridges, there is a lot to discover. But ultimately, the code itself mostly isn’t really as complex as it might seem from the outside world: just like a good magic trick, once unraveled, it all seems very simple and makes sense.

However, this is not true for one of those components: the security component. This black box full of dark magic doesn’t like to give up its secrets, and after some (miserably) failed attempts, I am trying to unravel it once more in a few blog posts. Either we achieve complete victory, or fail yet again.. At this point, I will give both fair odds.

He starts off with an overview of the component, pointing out the two main things is handles: authentication and authorization. He also pulls in a few other things to do with security in Symfony to give a more complete, well rounded picture - the component itself, the security bundle and security bridges. He gets into a bit more detail about this last one and describes their specific use.