11.6.10. About Security Mapping

Security mapping allows you to combine authentication and authorization information after the authentication or authorization happens, but before the information is passed to your application.
You can map principals (authentication), roles (authorization), or credentials (attributes which are not principals or roles).
Role Mapping is used to add, replace, or remove roles to the subject after authentication.
Principal mapping is used to modify a principal after authentication.
Attribute mapping is used to convert attributes from an external system to be used by your application, and vice versa.