do not make use of system properties for security configuration

Is there (or could there be) a way to set up security for ZK client that doesn't involve calls like

System.setProperty(ZooKeeperSaslClient.LOGIN_CONTEXT_NAME_KEY, SASL_LOGIN_CONTEXT_NAME);

?
I was looking at an unrelated security configuration issue and stumbled upon this pattern; we use (at least) 2 ZK connections from the same process, that (for now) use the same config but different context names, one of which is in a library out of our control. Unless I'm missing something with this pattern it seems extremely brittle. Or unless there's an alternative approach already; if there is, hadoop-common and hive don't use it atm, old approach seems prevalent.

There should be an approach that is at least slightly more solid, like say public globals... maybe even threadlocals!