System and method for providing pluggable security in an enterprise crawl and search framework environment

Abstract

A system and method are described, wherein the system includes an enterprise crawl and search framework, abstracts an underlying search engine, provides a common set of application programming interfaces for developing search functionalities, and allows the framework to serve as an integration layer between one or more enterprise search engines and one or more enterprise applications. A pluggable security environment which includes one or more enterprise application security APIs, authentication services, security plugin, authorization service, and data service, allows an application developer to add security information to enterprise application data before inserting or creating indexes on the search engine, and deploy the enterprise application and use any policies in its configuration to configure enterprise application domain security, so that at query time, the security environment retrieves security keys of a user performing an enterprise application search, and passes those keys to the search engine for filtering the query results.