Spring Security is a framework that provides comprehensive security services for Java applications, such as authentication, authorization, encryption, session management, and more. One of its features is method security, which allows applying access control rules at the method level using annotations or XML configuration. Another feature is authentication, which is the process of verifying the identity of a user or a system. Spring Security supports various authentication mechanisms, such as username and password, tokens, certificates, etc., and can access authentication data from different sources, such as databases, LDAP directories, in-memory stores, etc.