intermediateCustom AuthenticationProvider & Exception Handling

What are the two methods every AuthenticationProvider must implement, and what does each do?

authenticate(Authentication) performs the actual verification and returns a fully-populated, authenticated Authentication object on success (or throws AuthenticationException on failure). supports(Class<?>) tells ProviderManager whether this provider is capable of handling a given Authentication implementation type, so ProviderManager can pick the right provider without hardcoded type-checking logic.

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