Spring Cloud Security

Spring Cloud Security offers a set of primitives for building secure applications and services with minimum fuss. A declarative model which can be heavily configured externally (or centrally) lends itself to the implementation of large systems of co-operating, remote components, usually with a central indentity management service. It is also extremely easy to use in a service platform like Cloud Foundry. Building on Spring Boot and Spring Security OAuth2 we can quickly create systems that implement common patterns like single sign on, token relay and token exchange.

Spring Cloud is released under the non-restrictive Apache 2.0 license. If you would like to contribute to this section of the documentation or if you find an error, please find the source code and issue trackers in the project at github.

Quickstart

OAuth2 Single Sign On

Here’s a Spring Cloud "Hello World" app with HTTP Basic authentication and a single user account:

app.groovy

@Grab('spring-boot-starter-security')
@Controller
class Application {

  @RequestMapping('/')
  String home() {
    'Hello World'
  }

}

You can run it with spring run app.groovy and watch the logs for the password (username is "user"). So far this is just the default for a Spring Boot app.

Here’s a Spring Cloud app with OAuth2 SSO:

app.groovy

@Controller
@EnableOAuth2Sso
class Application {

  @RequestMapping('/')
  String home() {
    'Hello World'
  }

}

Spot the difference? This app will actually behave exactly the same as the previous one, because it doesn’t know it’s OAuth2 credentals yet.

You can register an app in github quite easily, so try that if you want a production app on your own domain. If you are happy to test on localhost:8080, then set up these properties in your application configuration:

application.yml

security:
  oauth2:
    client:
      clientId: bd1c0a783ccdd1c9b9e4
      clientSecret: 1a9030fbca47a5b2c28e92f19050bb77824b5ad1
      accessTokenUri: https://github.com/login/oauth/access_token
      userAuthorizationUri: https://github.com/login/oauth/authorize
      clientAuthenticationScheme: form
    resource:
      userInfoUri: https://api.github.com/user
      preferTokenInfo: false

run the app above and it will redirect to github for authorization. If you are already signed into github you won’t even notice that it has authenticated. These credentials will only work if your app is running on port 8080.

To limit the scope that the client asks for when it obtains an access token you can set security.oauth2.client.scope (comma separated or an array in YAML). By default the scope is empty and it is up to to Authorization Server to decide what the defaults should be, usually depending on the settings in the client registration that it holds.

The examples above are all Groovy scripts. If you want to write the same code in Java (or Groovy) you need to add Spring Security OAuth2 to the classpath (e.g. see the sample here).

OAuth2 Protected Resource

You want to protect an API resource with an OAuth2 token? Here’s a simple example (paired with the client above):

app.groovy

@Grab('spring-cloud-starter-security')
@RestController
@EnableResourceServer
class Application {

  @RequestMapping('/')
  def home() {
    [message: 'Hello World']
  }

}

and

application.yml

security:
  oauth2:
    resource:
      userInfoUri: https://api.github.com/user
      preferTokenInfo: false

More Detail

Single Sign On

All of the OAuth2 SSO and resource server features moved to Spring Boot in version 1.3. You can find documentation in the Spring Boot user guide.

Token Relay

A Token Relay is where an OAuth2 consumer acts as a Client and forwards the incoming token to outgoing resource requests. The consumer can be a pure Client (like an SSO application) or a Resource Server.

Client Token Relay in Spring Cloud Gateway

If your app also has a Spring Cloud Gateway embedded reverse proxy then you can ask it to forward OAuth2 access tokens downstream to the services it is proxying. Thus the SSO app above can be enhanced simply like this:

App.java

@Autowired
private TokenRelayGatewayFilterFactory filterFactory;

@Bean
public RouteLocator customRouteLocator(RouteLocatorBuilder builder) {
    return builder.routes()
            .route("resource", r -> r.path("/resource")
                    .filters(f -> f.filter(filterFactory.apply()))
                    .uri("http://localhost:9000"))
            .build();
}

or this

application.yaml

spring:
  cloud:
    gateway:
      routes:
      - id: resource
        uri: http://localhost:9000
        predicates:
        - Path=/resource
        filters:
        - TokenRelay=

and it will (in addition to logging the user in and grabbing a token) pass the authentication token downstream to the services (in this case /resource).

To enable this for Spring Cloud Gateway add the following dependencies

org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-oauth2-client
org.springframework.cloud:spring-cloud-starter-security

How does it work? The filter extracts an access token from the currently authenticated user, and puts it in a request header for the downstream requests.

For a full working sample see this project.

The default implementation of ReactiveOAuth2AuthorizedClientService used by TokenRelayGatewayFilterFactory uses an in-memory data store. You will need to provide your own implementation ReactiveOAuth2AuthorizedClientService if you need a more robust solution.

Client Token Relay

If your app is a user facing OAuth2 client (i.e. has declared @EnableOAuth2Sso or @EnableOAuth2Client) then it has an OAuth2ClientContext in request scope from Spring Boot. You can create your own OAuth2RestTemplate from this context and an autowired OAuth2ProtectedResourceDetails, and then the context will always forward the access token downstream, also refreshing the access token automatically if it expires. (These are features of Spring Security and Spring Boot.)

Spring Boot (1.4.1) does not create an OAuth2ProtectedResourceDetails automatically if you are using client_credentials tokens. In that case you need to create your own ClientCredentialsResourceDetails and configure it with @ConfigurationProperties("security.oauth2.client").

Client Token Relay in Zuul Proxy

If your app also has a Spring Cloud Zuul embedded reverse proxy (using @EnableZuulProxy) then you can ask it to forward OAuth2 access tokens downstream to the services it is proxying. Thus the SSO app above can be enhanced simply like this:

app.groovy

@Controller
@EnableOAuth2Sso
@EnableZuulProxy
class Application {

}

and it will (in addition to logging the user in and grabbing a token) pass the authentication token downstream to the /proxy/* services. If those services are implemented with @EnableResourceServer then they will get a valid token in the correct header.

How does it work? The @EnableOAuth2Sso annotation pulls in spring-cloud-starter-security (which you could do manually in a traditional app), and that in turn triggers some autoconfiguration for a ZuulFilter, which itself is activated because Zuul is on the classpath (via @EnableZuulProxy). The filter just extracts an access token from the currently authenticated user, and puts it in a request header for the downstream requests.

Spring Boot does not create an OAuth2RestOperations automatically which is needed for refresh_token. In that case you need to create your own OAuth2RestOperations so OAuth2TokenRelayFilter can refresh the token if needed.

Resource Server Token Relay

If your app has @EnableResourceServer you might want to relay the incoming token downstream to other services. If you use a RestTemplate to contact the downstream services then this is just a matter of how to create the template with the right context.

If your service uses UserInfoTokenServices to authenticate incoming tokens (i.e. it is using the security.oauth2.user-info-uri configuration), then you can simply create an OAuth2RestTemplate using an autowired OAuth2ClientContext (it will be populated by the authentication process before it hits the backend code). Equivalently (with Spring Boot 1.4), you could inject a UserInfoRestTemplateFactory and grab its OAuth2RestTemplate in your configuration. For example:

MyConfiguration.java

@Bean
public OAuth2RestTemplate restTemplate(UserInfoRestTemplateFactory factory) {
    return factory.getUserInfoRestTemplate();
}

This rest template will then have the same OAuth2ClientContext (request-scoped) that is used by the authentication filter, so you can use it to send requests with the same access token.

If your app is not using UserInfoTokenServices but is still a client (i.e. it declares @EnableOAuth2Client or @EnableOAuth2Sso), then with Spring Security Cloud any OAuth2RestOperations that the user creates from an @Autowired OAuth2Context will also forward tokens. This feature is implemented by default as an MVC handler interceptor, so it only works in Spring MVC. If you are not using MVC you could use a custom filter or AOP interceptor wrapping an AccessTokenContextRelay to provide the same feature.

Here’s a basic example showing the use of an autowired rest template created elsewhere ("foo.com" is a Resource Server accepting the same tokens as the surrounding app):

MyController.java

@Autowired
private OAuth2RestOperations restTemplate;

@RequestMapping("/relay")
public String relay() {
    ResponseEntity<String> response =
      restTemplate.getForEntity("https://foo.com/bar", String.class);
    return "Success! (" + response.getBody() + ")";
}

If you don’t want to forward tokens (and that is a valid choice, since you might want to act as yourself, rather than the client that sent you the token), then you only need to create your own OAuth2Context instead of autowiring the default one.

Feign clients will also pick up an interceptor that uses the OAuth2ClientContext if it is available, so they should also do a token relay anywhere where a RestTemplate would.

Configuring Authentication Downstream of a Zuul Proxy

You can control the authorization behaviour downstream of an @EnableZuulProxy through the proxy.auth.* settings. Example:

application.yml

proxy:
  auth:
    routes:
      customers: oauth2
      stores: passthru
      recommendations: none

In this example the "customers" service gets an OAuth2 token relay, the "stores" service gets a passthrough (the authorization header is just passed downstream), and the "recommendations" service has its authorization header removed. The default behaviour is to do a token relay if there is a token available, and passthru otherwise.

See ProxyAuthenticationProperties for full details.