How to get the role for current user with Spring Security

I'm trying to fetch all the roles for the current user who has been authenticated and show them in a JSP page.

I notice that there are some built-in expressions listed here: http://static.springsource.org/spring-security/site/docs/3.0.x/reference/el-access.html but I don't see any that would list all the roles.

What is SecurityContextHolder getContext () getAuthentication () getPrincipal ()?

The HttpServletRequest.getUserPrincipal() will return the result of SecurityContextHolder.getContext().getAuthentication() . This means it is an Authentication which is typically an instance of UsernamePasswordAuthenticationToken when using username and password based authentication.

You can use SecurityContextHolder.getContext().getAuthentication().getAuthorities() to obtain a collection of the currently logged in user's roles.