NPE thrown in SecurityContextAssociationValve.

With a debugger attached to AS7 I am seeing a NullPointerException thrown in a JBoss implementation of a Valve. This happens on every web request that does not have a principle in the session. The exception type has never appeared in logs because it is caught and a generic message is displayed.

This affects the performance.

Also the class uses the debugf logging method in the catch block. But does not pass in a format. A format is expected as the first parameter to the debugf method.

Included with this JIRA is a patch to change the code so that null references are detected. The second change changes the logging method call to instead use debug. Whether it should be a error message rather than a debug is a different matter and this JIRA does not tackle the question.

Regards,
Jeremy