Provides an API for plugging in authentication and authorization for members of a distributed system and clients.

### GemFire security framework

The security framework tackles two requirements: authentication of nodes and authorization for operations. The authentication piece deals with authentication of nodes in a peer-to-peer network as well as of the clients that connect to the servers.

It is not our plan to provide a sophisticated security infrastructure built into GemFire. Most enterprise customers have their own authentication and entitlement management infrastructure and our plan is make sure the framework allows application administrators to delegate the responsibility to external providers.