Spring Boot provides a spring-boot-starter-security starter which aggregates Spring Security related dependencies together. The simplest and preferred method to leverage the starter is to use Spring Initializr using an IDE integration (Eclipse, IntelliJ, NetBeans) or through https://start.spring.io.

Alternatively, the starter can be added manually:

pom.xml. 

<dependencies>
    <!-- ... other dependency elements ... -->
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-security</artifactId>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

Since Spring Boot provides a Maven BOM to manage dependency versions, there is no need to specify a version. If you wish to override the Spring Security version, you may do so by providing a Maven property:

pom.xml. 

<properties>
    <!-- ... -->
    <spring-security.version>5.1.10.RELEASE</spring-security.version>
</dependencies>

Since Spring Security only makes breaking changes in major releases, it is safe to use a newer version of Spring Security with Spring Boot. However, at times it may be necessary to update the version of Spring Framework as well. This can easily be done by adding a Maven property as well:

pom.xml. 

<properties>
    <!-- ... -->
    <spring.version>5.1.15.RELEASE</spring.version>
</dependencies>

If you are using additional features like LDAP, OpenID, etc. you will need to also include the appropriate Chapter 4, Project Modules.

When using Spring Security without Spring Boot, the preferred way is to leverage Spring Security’s BOM to ensure a consistent version of Spring Security is used throughout the entire project.

pom.xml. 

<dependencyManagement>
    <dependencies>
        <!-- ... other dependency elements ... -->
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework.security</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-security-bom</artifactId>
            <version>5.1.10.RELEASE</version>
            <type>pom</type>
            <scope>import</scope>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>
</dependencyManagement>

A minimal Spring Security Maven set of dependencies typically looks like the following:

pom.xml. 

<dependencies>
    <!-- ... other dependency elements ... -->
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.security</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-security-web</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.security</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-security-config</artifactId>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

If you are using additional features like LDAP, OpenID, etc. you will need to also include the appropriate Chapter 4, Project Modules.

Spring Security builds against Spring Framework 5.1.15.RELEASE, but should generally work with any newer version of Spring Framework 5.x The problem that many users will have is that Spring Security’s transitive dependencies resolve Spring Framework 5.1.15.RELEASE which can cause strange classpath problems. The easiest way to resolve this is to use the spring-framework-bom within your <dependencyManagement> section of your pom.xml as shown below:

pom.xml. 

<dependencyManagement>
    <dependencies>
        <!-- ... other dependency elements ... -->
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-framework-bom</artifactId>
            <version>5.1.15.RELEASE</version>
            <type>pom</type>
            <scope>import</scope>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>
</dependencyManagement>

This will ensure that all the transitive dependencies of Spring Security use the Spring 5.1.15.RELEASE modules.

	Note
	This approach uses Maven’s "bill of materials" (BOM) concept and is only available in Maven 2.0.9+. For additional details about how dependencies are resolved refer to Maven’s Introduction to the Dependency Mechanism documentation.

All GA releases (i.e. versions ending in .RELEASE) are deployed to Maven Central, so no additional Maven repositories need to be declared in your pom.

If you are using a SNAPSHOT version, you will need to ensure you have the Spring Snapshot repository defined as shown below:

pom.xml. 

<repositories>
    <!-- ... possibly other repository elements ... -->
    <repository>
        <id>spring-snapshot</id>
        <name>Spring Snapshot Repository</name>
        <url>https://repo.spring.io/snapshot</url>
    </repository>
</repositories>

If you are using a milestone or release candidate version, you will need to ensure you have the Spring Milestone repository defined as shown below:

pom.xml. 

<repositories>
    <!-- ... possibly other repository elements ... -->
    <repository>
        <id>spring-milestone</id>
        <name>Spring Milestone Repository</name>
        <url>https://repo.spring.io/milestone</url>
    </repository>
</repositories>

Spring Boot provides a spring-boot-starter-security starter which aggregates Spring Security related dependencies together. The simplest and preferred method to leverage the starter is to use Spring Initializr using an IDE integration (Eclipse, IntelliJ, NetBeans) or through https://start.spring.io.

Alternatively, the starter can be added manually:

build.gradle. 

dependencies {
    compile "org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-security"
}

Since Spring Boot provides a Maven BOM to manage dependency versions, there is no need to specify a version. If you wish to override the Spring Security version, you may do so by providing a Gradle property:

build.gradle. 

ext['spring-security.version']='5.1.10.RELEASE'

Since Spring Security only makes breaking changes in major releases, it is safe to use a newer version of Spring Security with Spring Boot. However, at times it may be necessary to update the version of Spring Framework as well. This can easily be done by adding a Gradle property as well:

build.gradle. 

ext['spring.version']='5.1.15.RELEASE'

If you are using additional features like LDAP, OpenID, etc. you will need to also include the appropriate Chapter 4, Project Modules.

When using Spring Security without Spring Boot, the preferred way is to leverage Spring Security’s BOM to ensure a consistent version of Spring Security is used throughout the entire project. This can be done by using the Dependency Management Plugin.

build.gradle. 

plugins {
    id "io.spring.dependency-management" version "1.0.6.RELEASE"
}

dependencyManagement {
    imports {
        mavenBom 'org.springframework.security:spring-security-bom:5.1.10.RELEASE'
    }
}

A minimal Spring Security Maven set of dependencies typically looks like the following:

build.gradle. 

dependencies {
    compile "org.springframework.security:spring-security-web"
    compile "org.springframework.security:spring-security-config"
}

If you are using additional features like LDAP, OpenID, etc. you will need to also include the appropriate Chapter 4, Project Modules.

Spring Security builds against Spring Framework 5.1.15.RELEASE, but should generally work with any newer version of Spring Framework 5.x The problem that many users will have is that Spring Security’s transitive dependencies resolve Spring Framework 5.1.15.RELEASE which can cause strange classpath problems. The easiest way to resolve this is to use the spring-framework-bom within your <dependencyManagement> section of your pom.xml as shown below: This can be done by using the Dependency Management Plugin.

build.gradle. 

plugins {
    id "io.spring.dependency-management" version "1.0.6.RELEASE"
}

dependencyManagement {
    imports {
        mavenBom 'org.springframework:spring-framework-bom:5.1.15.RELEASE'
    }
}

This will ensure that all the transitive dependencies of Spring Security use the Spring 5.1.15.RELEASE modules.

All GA releases (i.e. versions ending in .RELEASE) are deployed to Maven Central, so using the mavenCentral() repository is sufficient for GA releases.

build.gradle. 

repositories {
    mavenCentral()
}

If you are using a SNAPSHOT version, you will need to ensure you have the Spring Snapshot repository defined as shown below:

build.gradle. 

repositories {
    maven { url 'https://repo.spring.io/snapshot' }
}

If you are using a milestone or release candidate version, you will need to ensure you have the Spring Milestone repository defined as shown below:

build.gradle. 

repositories {
    maven { url 'https://repo.spring.io/milestone' }
}

The next step is to register the springSecurityFilterChain with the war. This can be done in Java Configuration with Spring’s WebApplicationInitializer support in a Servlet 3.0+ environment. Not suprisingly, Spring Security provides a base class AbstractSecurityWebApplicationInitializer that will ensure the springSecurityFilterChain gets registered for you. The way in which we use AbstractSecurityWebApplicationInitializer differs depending on if we are already using Spring or if Spring Security is the only Spring component in our application.

If you are not using Spring or Spring MVC, you will need to pass in the WebSecurityConfig into the superclass to ensure the configuration is picked up. You can find an example below:

import org.springframework.security.web.context.*;

public class SecurityWebApplicationInitializer
    extends AbstractSecurityWebApplicationInitializer {

    public SecurityWebApplicationInitializer() {
        super(WebSecurityConfig.class);
    }
}

The SecurityWebApplicationInitializer will do the following things:

If we were using Spring elsewhere in our application we probably already had a WebApplicationInitializer that is loading our Spring Configuration. If we use the previous configuration we would get an error. Instead, we should register Spring Security with the existing ApplicationContext. For example, if we were using Spring MVC our SecurityWebApplicationInitializer would look something like the following:

import org.springframework.security.web.context.*;

public class SecurityWebApplicationInitializer
    extends AbstractSecurityWebApplicationInitializer {

}

This would simply only register the springSecurityFilterChain Filter for every URL in your application. After that we would ensure that WebSecurityConfig was loaded in our existing ApplicationInitializer. For example, if we were using Spring MVC it would be added in the getRootConfigClasses()

public class MvcWebApplicationInitializer extends
        AbstractAnnotationConfigDispatcherServletInitializer {

    @Override
    protected Class<?>[] getRootConfigClasses() {
        return new Class[] { WebSecurityConfig.class };
    }

    // ... other overrides ...
}

Generally, LogoutHandler implementations indicate classes that are able to participate in logout handling. They are expected to be invoked to perform necessary clean-up. As such they should not throw exceptions. Various implementations are provided:

Please see Section 10.5.4, “Remember-Me Interfaces and Implementations” for details.

Instead of providing LogoutHandler implementations directly, the fluent API also provides shortcuts that provide the respective LogoutHandler implementations under the covers. E.g. deleteCookies() allows specifying the names of one or more cookies to be removed on logout success. This is a shortcut compared to adding a CookieClearingLogoutHandler.

The LogoutSuccessHandler is called after a successful logout by the LogoutFilter, to handle e.g. redirection or forwarding to the appropriate destination. Note that the interface is almost the same as the LogoutHandler but may raise an exception.

The following implementations are provided:

As mentioned above, you don’t need to specify the SimpleUrlLogoutSuccessHandler directly. Instead, the fluent API provides a shortcut by setting the logoutSuccessUrl(). This will setup the SimpleUrlLogoutSuccessHandler under the covers. The provided URL will be redirected to after a logout has occurred. The default is /login?logout.

The HttpStatusReturningLogoutSuccessHandler can be interesting in REST API type scenarios. Instead of redirecting to a URL upon the successful logout, this LogoutSuccessHandler allows you to provide a plain HTTP status code to be returned. If not configured a status code 200 will be returned by default.

ClientRegistration is a representation of a client registered with an OAuth 2.0 or OpenID Connect 1.0 Provider.

A client registration holds information, such as client id, client secret, authorization grant type, redirect URI, scope(s), authorization URI, token URI, and other details.

ClientRegistration and its properties are defined as follows:

public final class ClientRegistration {
    private String registrationId;  
    private String clientId;    
    private String clientSecret;    
    private ClientAuthenticationMethod clientAuthenticationMethod;  
    private AuthorizationGrantType authorizationGrantType;  
    private String redirectUriTemplate; 
    private Set<String> scopes; 
    private ProviderDetails providerDetails;
    private String clientName;  

    public class ProviderDetails {
        private String authorizationUri;    
        private String tokenUri;    
        private UserInfoEndpoint userInfoEndpoint;
        private String jwkSetUri;   
        private Map<String, Object> configurationMetadata;  

        public class UserInfoEndpoint {
            private String uri; 
            private AuthenticationMethod authenticationMethod;  
            private String userNameAttributeName;   

        }
    }
}

The ClientRegistrationRepository serves as a repository for OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect 1.0 ClientRegistration(s).

	Note
	Client registration information is ultimately stored and owned by the associated Authorization Server. This repository provides the ability to retrieve a sub-set of the primary client registration information, which is stored with the Authorization Server.

Spring Boot 2.x auto-configuration binds each of the properties under spring.security.oauth2.client.registration.[registrationId] to an instance of ClientRegistration and then composes each of the ClientRegistration instance(s) within a ClientRegistrationRepository.

	Note
	The default implementation of ClientRegistrationRepository is InMemoryClientRegistrationRepository.

The auto-configuration also registers the ClientRegistrationRepository as a @Bean in the ApplicationContext so that it is available for dependency-injection, if needed by the application.

The following listing shows an example:

@Controller
public class OAuth2ClientController {

    @Autowired
    private ClientRegistrationRepository clientRegistrationRepository;

    @RequestMapping("/")
    public String index() {
        ClientRegistration googleRegistration =
            this.clientRegistrationRepository.findByRegistrationId("google");

        ...

        return "index";
    }
}

OAuth2AuthorizedClient is a representation of an Authorized Client. A client is considered to be authorized when the end-user (Resource Owner) has granted authorization to the client to access its protected resources.

OAuth2AuthorizedClient serves the purpose of associating an OAuth2AccessToken (and optional OAuth2RefreshToken) to a ClientRegistration (client) and resource owner, who is the Principal end-user that granted the authorization.

OAuth2AuthorizedClientRepository is responsible for persisting OAuth2AuthorizedClient(s) between web requests. Whereas, the primary role of OAuth2AuthorizedClientService is to manage OAuth2AuthorizedClient(s) at the application-level.

From a developer perspective, the OAuth2AuthorizedClientRepository or OAuth2AuthorizedClientService provides the capability to lookup an OAuth2AccessToken associated with a client so that it may be used to initiate a protected resource request.

	Note
	Spring Boot 2.x auto-configuration registers an OAuth2AuthorizedClientRepository and/or OAuth2AuthorizedClientService @Bean in the ApplicationContext.

The developer may also register an OAuth2AuthorizedClientRepository or OAuth2AuthorizedClientService @Bean in the ApplicationContext (overriding Spring Boot 2.x auto-configuration) in order to have the ability to lookup an OAuth2AccessToken associated with a specific ClientRegistration (client).

The following listing shows an example:

@Controller
public class OAuth2LoginController {

    @Autowired
    private OAuth2AuthorizedClientService authorizedClientService;

    @RequestMapping("/userinfo")
    public String userinfo(OAuth2AuthenticationToken authentication) {
        // authentication.getAuthorizedClientRegistrationId() returns the
        // registrationId of the Client that was authorized during the oauth2Login() flow
        OAuth2AuthorizedClient authorizedClient =
            this.authorizedClientService.loadAuthorizedClient(
                authentication.getAuthorizedClientRegistrationId(),
                authentication.getName());

        OAuth2AccessToken accessToken = authorizedClient.getAccessToken();

        ...

        return "userinfo";
    }
}

The @RegisteredOAuth2AuthorizedClient annotation provides the capability of resolving a method parameter to an argument value of type OAuth2AuthorizedClient. This is a convenient alternative compared to looking up the OAuth2AuthorizedClient via the OAuth2AuthorizedClientService.

@Controller
public class OAuth2LoginController {

    @RequestMapping("/userinfo")
    public String userinfo(@RegisteredOAuth2AuthorizedClient("google") OAuth2AuthorizedClient authorizedClient) {
        OAuth2AccessToken accessToken = authorizedClient.getAccessToken();

        ...

        return "userinfo";
    }
}

The @RegisteredOAuth2AuthorizedClient annotation is handled by OAuth2AuthorizedClientArgumentResolver and provides the following capabilities:

AuthorizationRequestRepository is responsible for the persistence of the OAuth2AuthorizationRequest from the time the Authorization Request is initiated to the time the Authorization Response is received (the callback).

	Tip
	The OAuth2AuthorizationRequest is used to correlate and validate the Authorization Response.

The default implementation of AuthorizationRequestRepository is HttpSessionOAuth2AuthorizationRequestRepository, which stores the OAuth2AuthorizationRequest in the HttpSession.

If you would like to provide a custom implementation of AuthorizationRequestRepository that stores the attributes of OAuth2AuthorizationRequest in a Cookie, you may configure it as shown in the following example:

@EnableWebSecurity
public class OAuth2ClientSecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {

    @Override
    protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
        http
            .oauth2Client()
                .authorizationCodeGrant()
                    .authorizationRequestRepository(this.cookieAuthorizationRequestRepository())
                    ...
    }

    private AuthorizationRequestRepository<OAuth2AuthorizationRequest> cookieAuthorizationRequestRepository() {
        return new HttpCookieOAuth2AuthorizationRequestRepository();
    }
}

The primary role of the OAuth2AuthorizationRequestResolver is to resolve an OAuth2AuthorizationRequest from the provided web request. The default implementation DefaultOAuth2AuthorizationRequestResolver matches on the (default) path /oauth2/authorization/{registrationId} extracting the registrationId and using it to build the OAuth2AuthorizationRequest for the associated ClientRegistration.

One of the primary use cases an OAuth2AuthorizationRequestResolver can realize is the ability to customize the Authorization Request with additional parameters above the standard parameters defined in the OAuth 2.0 Authorization Framework.

For example, OpenID Connect defines additional OAuth 2.0 request parameters for the Authorization Code Flow extending from the standard parameters defined in the OAuth 2.0 Authorization Framework. One of those extended parameters is the prompt parameter.

	Note
	OPTIONAL. Space delimited, case sensitive list of ASCII string values that specifies whether the Authorization Server prompts the End-User for reauthentication and consent. The defined values are: none, login, consent, select_account

The following example shows how to implement an OAuth2AuthorizationRequestResolver that customizes the Authorization Request for oauth2Login(), by including the request parameter prompt=consent.

@EnableWebSecurity
public class OAuth2LoginSecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {

    @Autowired
    private ClientRegistrationRepository clientRegistrationRepository;

    @Override
    protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
        http
            .authorizeRequests()
                .anyRequest().authenticated()
                .and()
            .oauth2Login()
                .authorizationEndpoint()
                    .authorizationRequestResolver(
                            new CustomAuthorizationRequestResolver(
                                    this.clientRegistrationRepository));    
    }
}

public class CustomAuthorizationRequestResolver implements OAuth2AuthorizationRequestResolver {
    private final OAuth2AuthorizationRequestResolver defaultAuthorizationRequestResolver;

    public CustomAuthorizationRequestResolver(
            ClientRegistrationRepository clientRegistrationRepository) {

        this.defaultAuthorizationRequestResolver =
                new DefaultOAuth2AuthorizationRequestResolver(
                        clientRegistrationRepository, "/oauth2/authorization");
    }

    @Override
    public OAuth2AuthorizationRequest resolve(HttpServletRequest request) {
        OAuth2AuthorizationRequest authorizationRequest =
                this.defaultAuthorizationRequestResolver.resolve(request);  

        return authorizationRequest != null ?   
                customAuthorizationRequest(authorizationRequest) :
                null;
    }

    @Override
    public OAuth2AuthorizationRequest resolve(
            HttpServletRequest request, String clientRegistrationId) {

        OAuth2AuthorizationRequest authorizationRequest =
                this.defaultAuthorizationRequestResolver.resolve(
                    request, clientRegistrationId);    

        return authorizationRequest != null ?   
                customAuthorizationRequest(authorizationRequest) :
                null;
    }

    private OAuth2AuthorizationRequest customAuthorizationRequest(
            OAuth2AuthorizationRequest authorizationRequest) {

        Map<String, Object> additionalParameters =
                new LinkedHashMap<>(authorizationRequest.getAdditionalParameters());
        additionalParameters.put("prompt", "consent");  

        return OAuth2AuthorizationRequest.from(authorizationRequest)    
                .additionalParameters(additionalParameters) 
                .build();
    }
}

	Tip
	OAuth2AuthorizationRequest.Builder.build() constructs the OAuth2AuthorizationRequest.authorizationRequestUri, which represents the complete Authorization Request URI including all query parameters using the application/x-www-form-urlencoded format.

The preceding example shows the common use case of adding a custom parameter on top of the standard parameters. However, if you need to remove or change a standard parameter or your requirements are more advanced, than you can take full control in building the Authorization Request URI by simply overriding the OAuth2AuthorizationRequest.authorizationRequestUri property.

The following example shows a variation of the customAuthorizationRequest() method from the preceding example, and instead overrides the OAuth2AuthorizationRequest.authorizationRequestUri property.

private OAuth2AuthorizationRequest customAuthorizationRequest(
        OAuth2AuthorizationRequest authorizationRequest) {

    String customAuthorizationRequestUri = UriComponentsBuilder
            .fromUriString(authorizationRequest.getAuthorizationRequestUri())
            .queryParam("prompt", "consent")
            .build(true)
            .toUriString();

    return OAuth2AuthorizationRequest.from(authorizationRequest)
            .authorizationRequestUri(customAuthorizationRequestUri)
            .build();
}

The primary role of the OAuth2AccessTokenResponseClient is to exchange an authorization grant credential for an access token credential at the Authorization Server’s Token Endpoint.

The default implementation of OAuth2AccessTokenResponseClient for the authorization_code grant is DefaultAuthorizationCodeTokenResponseClient, which uses a RestOperations for exchanging an authorization code for an access token at the Token Endpoint.

The DefaultAuthorizationCodeTokenResponseClient is quite flexible as it allows you to customize the pre-processing of the Token Request and/or post-handling of the Token Response.

If you need to customize the pre-processing of the Token Request, you can provide DefaultAuthorizationCodeTokenResponseClient.setRequestEntityConverter() with a custom Converter<OAuth2AuthorizationCodeGrantRequest, RequestEntity<?>>. The default implementation OAuth2AuthorizationCodeGrantRequestEntityConverter builds a RequestEntity representation of a standard OAuth 2.0 Access Token Request. However, providing a custom Converter, would allow you to extend the standard Token Request and add a custom parameter for example.

	Important
	The custom Converter must return a valid RequestEntity representation of an OAuth 2.0 Access Token Request that is understood by the intended OAuth 2.0 Provider.

On the other end, if you need to customize the post-handling of the Token Response, you will need to provide DefaultAuthorizationCodeTokenResponseClient.setRestOperations() with a custom configured RestOperations. The default RestOperations is configured as follows:

RestTemplate restTemplate = new RestTemplate(Arrays.asList(
        new FormHttpMessageConverter(),
        new OAuth2AccessTokenResponseHttpMessageConverter()));

restTemplate.setErrorHandler(new OAuth2ErrorResponseErrorHandler());

	Tip
	Spring MVC FormHttpMessageConverter is required as it’s used when sending the OAuth 2.0 Access Token Request.

OAuth2AccessTokenResponseHttpMessageConverter is a HttpMessageConverter for an OAuth 2.0 Access Token Response. You can provide OAuth2AccessTokenResponseHttpMessageConverter.setTokenResponseConverter() with a custom Converter<Map<String, String>, OAuth2AccessTokenResponse> that is used for converting the OAuth 2.0 Access Token Response parameters to an OAuth2AccessTokenResponse.

OAuth2ErrorResponseErrorHandler is a ResponseErrorHandler that can handle an OAuth 2.0 Error (400 Bad Request). It uses an OAuth2ErrorHttpMessageConverter for converting the OAuth 2.0 Error parameters to an OAuth2Error.

Whether you customize DefaultAuthorizationCodeTokenResponseClient or provide your own implementation of OAuth2AccessTokenResponseClient, you’ll need to configure it as shown in the following example:

@EnableWebSecurity
public class OAuth2ClientSecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {

    @Override
    protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
        http
            .oauth2Client()
                .authorizationCodeGrant()
                    .accessTokenResponseClient(this.customAccessTokenResponseClient())
                    ...
    }

    private OAuth2AccessTokenResponseClient<OAuth2AuthorizationCodeGrantRequest> customAccessTokenResponseClient() {
        ...
    }
}

Spring Boot 2.x brings full auto-configuration capabilities for OAuth 2.0 Login.

This section shows how to configure the OAuth 2.0 Login sample using Google as the Authentication Provider and covers the following topics:

Initial setup

To use Google’s OAuth 2.0 authentication system for login, you must set up a project in the Google API Console to obtain OAuth 2.0 credentials.

	Note
	Google’s OAuth 2.0 implementation for authentication conforms to the OpenID Connect 1.0 specification and is OpenID Certified.

Follow the instructions on the OpenID Connect page, starting in the section, "Setting up OAuth 2.0".

After completing the "Obtain OAuth 2.0 credentials" instructions, you should have a new OAuth Client with credentials consisting of a Client ID and a Client Secret.

Setting the redirect URI

The redirect URI is the path in the application that the end-user’s user-agent is redirected back to after they have authenticated with Google and have granted access to the OAuth Client (created in the previous step) on the Consent page.

In the "Set a redirect URI" sub-section, ensure that the Authorized redirect URIs field is set to http://localhost:8080/login/oauth2/code/google.

	Tip
	The default redirect URI template is {baseUrl}/login/oauth2/code/{registrationId}. The registrationId is a unique identifier for the ClientRegistration.

The following table outlines the mapping of the Spring Boot 2.x OAuth Client properties to the ClientRegistration properties.

CommonOAuth2Provider pre-defines a set of default client properties for a number of well known providers: Google, GitHub, Facebook, and Okta.

For example, the authorization-uri, token-uri, and user-info-uri do not change often for a Provider. Therefore, it makes sense to provide default values in order to reduce the required configuration.

As demonstrated previously, when we configured a Google client, only the client-id and client-secret properties are required.

The following listing shows an example:

spring:
  security:
    oauth2:
      client:
        registration:
          google:
            client-id: google-client-id
            client-secret: google-client-secret

	Tip
	The auto-defaulting of client properties works seamlessly here because the registrationId (google) matches the GOOGLE enum (case-insensitive) in CommonOAuth2Provider.

For cases where you may want to specify a different registrationId, such as google-login, you can still leverage auto-defaulting of client properties by configuring the provider property.

The following listing shows an example:

spring:
  security:
    oauth2:
      client:
        registration:
          google-login: 
            provider: google    
            client-id: google-client-id
            client-secret: google-client-secret

There are some OAuth 2.0 Providers that support multi-tenancy, which results in different protocol endpoints for each tenant (or sub-domain).

For example, an OAuth Client registered with Okta is assigned to a specific sub-domain and have their own protocol endpoints.

For these cases, Spring Boot 2.x provides the following base property for configuring custom provider properties: spring.security.oauth2.client.provider.[providerId].

The following listing shows an example:

spring:
  security:
    oauth2:
      client:
        registration:
          okta:
            client-id: okta-client-id
            client-secret: okta-client-secret
        provider:
          okta: 
            authorization-uri: https://your-subdomain.oktapreview.com/oauth2/v1/authorize
            token-uri: https://your-subdomain.oktapreview.com/oauth2/v1/token
            user-info-uri: https://your-subdomain.oktapreview.com/oauth2/v1/userinfo
            user-name-attribute: sub
            jwk-set-uri: https://your-subdomain.oktapreview.com/oauth2/v1/keys

The Spring Boot 2.x auto-configuration class for OAuth Client support is OAuth2ClientAutoConfiguration.

It performs the following tasks:

If you need to override the auto-configuration based on your specific requirements, you may do so in the following ways:

@Configuration
public class OAuth2LoginConfig {

    @Bean
    public ClientRegistrationRepository clientRegistrationRepository() {
        return new InMemoryClientRegistrationRepository(this.googleClientRegistration());
    }

    private ClientRegistration googleClientRegistration() {
        return ClientRegistration.withRegistrationId("google")
            .clientId("google-client-id")
            .clientSecret("google-client-secret")
            .clientAuthenticationMethod(ClientAuthenticationMethod.BASIC)
            .authorizationGrantType(AuthorizationGrantType.AUTHORIZATION_CODE)
            .redirectUriTemplate("{baseUrl}/login/oauth2/code/{registrationId}")
            .scope("openid", "profile", "email", "address", "phone")
            .authorizationUri("https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/v2/auth")
            .tokenUri("https://www.googleapis.com/oauth2/v4/token")
            .userInfoUri("https://www.googleapis.com/oauth2/v3/userinfo")
            .userNameAttributeName(IdTokenClaimNames.SUB)
            .jwkSetUri("https://www.googleapis.com/oauth2/v3/certs")
            .clientName("Google")
            .build();
    }
}

@EnableWebSecurity
public class OAuth2LoginSecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {

    @Override
    protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
        http
            .authorizeRequests()
                .anyRequest().authenticated()
                .and()
            .oauth2Login();
    }
}

@Configuration
public class OAuth2LoginConfig {

    @EnableWebSecurity
    public static class OAuth2LoginSecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {

        @Override
        protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
            http
                .authorizeRequests()
                    .anyRequest().authenticated()
                    .and()
                .oauth2Login();
        }
    }

    @Bean
    public ClientRegistrationRepository clientRegistrationRepository() {
        return new InMemoryClientRegistrationRepository(this.googleClientRegistration());
    }

    private ClientRegistration googleClientRegistration() {
        return ClientRegistration.withRegistrationId("google")
            .clientId("google-client-id")
            .clientSecret("google-client-secret")
            .clientAuthenticationMethod(ClientAuthenticationMethod.BASIC)
            .authorizationGrantType(AuthorizationGrantType.AUTHORIZATION_CODE)
            .redirectUriTemplate("{baseUrl}/login/oauth2/code/{registrationId}")
            .scope("openid", "profile", "email", "address", "phone")
            .authorizationUri("https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/v2/auth")
            .tokenUri("https://www.googleapis.com/oauth2/v4/token")
            .userInfoUri("https://www.googleapis.com/oauth2/v3/userinfo")
            .userNameAttributeName(IdTokenClaimNames.SUB)
            .jwkSetUri("https://www.googleapis.com/oauth2/v3/certs")
            .clientName("Google")
            .build();
    }
}

If you are not able to use Spring Boot 2.x and would like to configure one of the pre-defined providers in CommonOAuth2Provider (for example, Google), apply the following configuration:

@Configuration
public class OAuth2LoginConfig {

    @EnableWebSecurity
    public static class OAuth2LoginSecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {

        @Override
        protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
            http
                .authorizeRequests()
                    .anyRequest().authenticated()
                    .and()
                .oauth2Login();
        }
    }

    @Bean
    public ClientRegistrationRepository clientRegistrationRepository() {
        return new InMemoryClientRegistrationRepository(this.googleClientRegistration());
    }

    @Bean
    public OAuth2AuthorizedClientService authorizedClientService(
            ClientRegistrationRepository clientRegistrationRepository) {
        return new InMemoryOAuth2AuthorizedClientService(clientRegistrationRepository);
    }

    @Bean
    public OAuth2AuthorizedClientRepository authorizedClientRepository(
            OAuth2AuthorizedClientService authorizedClientService) {
        return new AuthenticatedPrincipalOAuth2AuthorizedClientRepository(authorizedClientService);
    }

    private ClientRegistration googleClientRegistration() {
        return CommonOAuth2Provider.GOOGLE.getBuilder("google")
            .clientId("google-client-id")
            .clientSecret("google-client-secret")
            .build();
    }
}

The following additional resources describe advanced configuration options:

Most Resource Server support is collected into spring-security-oauth2-resource-server. However, the support for decoding and verifying JWTs is in spring-security-oauth2-jose, meaning that both are necessary in order to have a working resource server that supports JWT-encoded Bearer Tokens.

When using Spring Boot, configuring an application as a resource server consists of two basic steps. First, include the needed dependencies and second, indicate the location of the authorization server.

Specifying the Authorization Server

To specify which authorization server to use, simply do:

security:
  oauth2:
    resourceserver:
      jwt:
        issuer-uri: https://idp.example.com

Where https://idp.example.com is the value contained in the iss claim for JWT tokens that the authorization server will issue. Resource Server will use this property to further self-configure, discover the authorization server’s public keys, and subsequently validate incoming JWTs.

	Note
	To use the issuer-uri property, it must also be true that https://idp.example.com/.well-known/openid-configuration is a supported endpoint for the authorization server. This endpoint is referred to as a Provider Configuration endpoint.

And that’s it!

Startup Expectations

When this property and these dependencies are used, Resource Server will automatically configure itself to validate JWT-encoded Bearer Tokens.

It achieves this through a deterministic startup process:

1. Hit the Provider Configuration endpoint, https://idp.example.com/.well-known/openid-configuration, processing the response for the jwks_url property
2. Configure the validation strategy to query jwks_url for valid public keys
3. Configure the validation strategy to validate each JWTs iss claim against https://idp.example.com.

A consequence of this process is that the authorization server must be up and receiving requests in order for Resource Server to successfully start up.

	Note
	If the authorization server is down when Resource Server queries it (given appropriate timeouts), then startup will fail.

Runtime Expectations

Once the application is started up, Resource Server will attempt to process any request containing an Authorization: Bearer header:

GET / HTTP/1.1
Authorization: Bearer some-token-value # Resource Server will process this

So long as this scheme is indicated, Resource Server will attempt to process the request according to the Bearer Token specification.

Given a well-formed JWT token, Resource Server will

1. Validate its signature against a public key obtained from the jwks_url endpoint during startup and matched against the JWTs header
2. Validate the JWTs exp and nbf timestamps and the JWTs iss claim, and
3. Map each scope to an authority with the prefix SCOPE_.

	Note
	As the authorization server makes available new keys, Spring Security will automatically rotate the keys used to validate the JWT tokens.

The resulting Authentication#getPrincipal, by default, is a Spring Security Jwt object, and Authentication#getName maps to the JWT’s sub property, if one is present.

From here, consider jumping to:

How to Configure without Tying Resource Server startup to an authorization server’s availability

How to Configure without Spring Boot

If the authorization server doesn’t support the Provider Configuration endpoint, or if Resource Server must be able to start up independently from the authorization server, then issuer-uri can be exchanged for jwk-set-uri:

security:
  oauth2:
    resourceserver:
      jwt:
        jwk-set-uri: https://idp.example.com/.well-known/jwks.json

	Note
	The JWK Set uri is not standardized, but can typically be found in the authorization server’s documentation

Consequently, Resource Server will not ping the authorization server at startup. However, it will also no longer validate the iss claim in the JWT (since Resource Server no longer knows what the issuer value should be).

	Note
	This property can also be supplied directly on the DSL.

There are two @Bean s that Spring Boot generates on Resource Server’s behalf.

The first is a WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter that configures the app as a resource server:

protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) {
    http
        .authorizeRequests()
            .anyRequest().authenticated()
            .and()
        .oauth2ResourceServer()
            .jwt();
}

If the application doesn’t expose a WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter bean, then Spring Boot will expose the above default one.

Replacing this is as simple as exposing the bean within the application:

@EnableWebSecurity
public class MyCustomSecurityConfiguration extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {
    protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) {
        http
            .authorizeRequests()
                .mvcMatchers("/messages/**").hasAuthority("SCOPE_message:read")
                .anyRequest().authenticated()
                .and()
            .oauth2ResourceServer()
                .jwt()
                    .jwtAuthenticationConverter(myConverter());
    }
}

The above requires the scope of message:read for any URL that starts with /messages/.

Methods on the oauth2ResourceServer DSL will also override or replace auto configuration.

For example, the second @Bean Spring Boot creates is a JwtDecoder, which decodes String tokens into validated instances of Jwt:

@Bean
public JwtDecoder jwtDecoder() {
    return JwtDecoders.fromOidcIssuerLocation(issuerUri);
}

If the application doesn’t expose a JwtDecoder bean, then Spring Boot will expose the above default one.

And its configuration can be overridden using jwkSetUri() or replaced using decoder().

@EnableWebSecurity
public class DirectlyConfiguredJwkSetUri extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {
    protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) {
        http
            .authorizeRequests()
                .anyRequest().authenticated()
                .and()
            .oauth2ResourceServer()
                .jwt()
                    .jwkSetUri("https://idp.example.com/.well-known/jwks.json");
    }
}

@EnableWebSecurity
public class DirectlyConfiguredJwkSetUri extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {
    protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) {
        http
            .authorizeRequests()
                .anyRequest().authenticated()
                .and()
            .oauth2ResourceServer()
                .jwt()
                    .decoder(myCustomDecoder());
    }
}

@Bean
public JwtDecoder jwtDecoder() {
    return new NimbusJwtDecoderJwkSupport(jwkSetUri);
}

A JWT that is issued from an OAuth 2.0 Authorization Server will typically either have a scope or scp attribute, indicating the scopes (or authorities) it’s been granted, for example:

{ …​, "scope" : "messages contacts"}

When this is the case, Resource Server will attempt to coerce these scopes into a list of granted authorities, prefixing each scope with the string "SCOPE_".

This means that to protect an endpoint or method with a scope derived from a JWT, the corresponding expressions should include this prefix:

@EnableWebSecurity
public class DirectlyConfiguredJwkSetUri extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {
    protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) {
        http
            .authorizeRequests()
                .mvcMatchers("/contacts/**").hasAuthority("SCOPE_contacts")
                .mvcMatchers("/messages/**").hasAuthority("SCOPE_messages")
                .anyRequest().authenticated()
                .and()
            .oauth2ResourceServer()
                .jwt();
    }
}

Or similarly with method security:

@PreAuthorize("hasAuthority('SCOPE_messages')")
public List<Message> getMessages(...) {}

@EnableWebSecurity
public class DirectlyConfiguredJwkSetUri extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {
    protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) {
        http
            .authorizeRequests()
                .anyRequest().authenticated()
                .and()
            .oauth2ResourceServer()
                .jwt()
                    .jwtAuthenticationConverter(grantedAuthoritiesExtractor());
    }
}

Converter<Jwt, AbstractAuthenticationToken> grantedAuthoritiesExtractor() {
    return new GrantedAuthoritiesExtractor();
}

static class GrantedAuthoritiesExtractor extends JwtAuthenticationConverter {
    protected Collection<GrantedAuthorities> extractAuthorities(Jwt jwt) {
        Collection<String> authorities = (Collection<String>)
                jwt.getClaims().get("mycustomclaim");

        return authorities.stream()
                .map(SimpleGrantedAuthority::new)
                .collect(Collectors.toList());
    }
}

static class CustomAuthenticationConverter implements Converter<Jwt, AbstractAuthenticationToken> {
    public AbstractAuthenticationToken convert(Jwt jwt) {
        return new CustomAuthenticationToken(jwt);
    }
}

Using minimal Spring Boot configuration, indicating the authorization server’s issuer uri, Resource Server will default to verifying the iss claim as well as the exp and nbf timestamp claims.

In circumstances where validation needs to be customized, Resource Server ships with two standard validators and also accepts custom OAuth2TokenValidator instances.

Customizing Timestamp Validation

JWT’s typically have a window of validity, with the start of the window indicated in the nbf claim and the end indicated in the exp claim.

However, every server can experience clock drift, which can cause tokens to appear expired to one server, but not to another. This can cause some implementation heartburn as the number of collaborating servers increases in a distributed system.

Resource Server uses JwtTimestampValidator to verify a token’s validity window, and it can be configured with a clockSkew to alleviate the above problem:

@Bean
JwtDecoder jwtDecoder() {
     NimbusJwtDecoder jwtDecoder = (NimbusJwtDecoder)
             JwtDecoders.fromOidcIssuerLocation(issuerUri);

     OAuth2TokenValidator<Jwt> withClockSkew = new DelegatingOAuth2TokenValidator<>(
            new JwtTimestampValidator(Duration.ofSeconds(60)),
            new IssuerValidator(issuerUri));

     jwtDecoder.setJwtValidator(withClockSkew);

     return jwtDecoder;
}

	Note
	By default, Resource Server configures a clock skew of 30 seconds.

public class AudienceValidator implements OAuth2TokenValidator<Jwt> {
    OAuth2Error error = new OAuth2Error("invalid_token", "The required audience is missing", null);

    public OAuth2TokenValidatorResult validate(Jwt jwt) {
        if (jwt.getAudience().contains("messaging")) {
            return OAuth2TokenValidatorResult.success();
        } else {
            return OAuth2TokenValidatorResult.failure(error);
        }
    }
}

@Bean
JwtDecoder jwtDecoder() {
    NimbusJwtDecoder jwtDecoder = (NimbusJwtDecoder)
        JwtDecoders.fromOidcIssuerLocation(issuerUri);

    OAuth2TokenValidator<Jwt> audienceValidator = new AudienceValidator();
    OAuth2TokenValidator<Jwt> withIssuer = JwtValidators.createDefaultWithIssuer(issuerUri);
    OAuth2TokenValidator<Jwt> withAudience = new DelegatingOAuth2TokenValidator<>(withIssuer, audienceValidator);

    jwtDecoder.setJwtValidator(withAudience);

    return jwtDecoder;
}

Spring Security uses the Nimbus library for parsing JWTs and validating their signatures. Consequently, Spring Security is subject to Nimbus’s interpretation of each field value and how to coerce each into a Java type.

For example, because Nimbus remains Java 7 compatible, it doesn’t use Instant to represent timestamp fields.

And it’s entirely possible to use a different library or for JWT processing, which may make its own coercion decisions that need adjustment.

Or, quite simply, a resource server may want to add or remove claims from a JWT for domain-specific reasons.

For these purposes, Resource Server supports mapping the JWT claim set with MappedJwtClaimSetConverter.

@Bean
JwtDecoder jwtDecoder() {
    NimbusJwtDecoderJwkSupport jwtDecoder = new NimbusJwtDecoderJwkSupport(jwkSetUri);

    MappedJwtClaimSetConverter converter = MappedJwtClaimSetConverter
            .withDefaults(Collections.singletonMap("sub", this::lookupUserIdBySub));
    jwtDecoder.setJwtClaimSetConverter(converter);

    return jwtDecoder;
}

MappedJwtClaimSetConverter.withDefaults(Collections.singletonMap("custom", custom -> "value"));

MappedJwtClaimSetConverter.withDefaults(Collections.singletonMap("legacyclaim", legacy -> null));

public class UsernameSubClaimAdapter implements Converter<Map<String, Object>, Map<String, Object>> {
    private final MappedJwtClaimSetConverter delegate =
            MappedJwtClaimSetConverter.withDefaults(Collections.emptyMap());

    public Map<String, Object> convert(Map<String, Object> claims) {
        Map<String, Object> convertedClaims = this.delegate.convert(claims);

        String username = (String) convertedClaims.get("user_name");
        convertedClaims.put("sub", username);

        return convertedClaims;
    }
}

@Bean
JwtDecoder jwtDecoder() {
    NimbusJwtDecoderJwkSupport jwtDecoder = new NimbusJwtDecoderJwkSupport(jwkSetUri);
    jwtDecoder.setJwtClaimSetConverter(new UsernameSubClaimAdapter());
    return jwtDecoder;
}

By default, Resource Server uses connection and socket timeouts of 30 seconds each for coordinating with the authorization server.

This may be too short in some scenarios. Further, it doesn’t take into account more sophisticated patterns like back-off and discovery.

To adjust the way in which Resource Server connects to the authorization server, NimbusJwtDecoderJwkSupport accepts an instance of RestOperations:

@Bean
public JwtDecoder jwtDecoder(RestTemplateBuilder builder) {
    RestOperations rest = builder
            .setConnectionTimeout(60000)
            .setReadTimeout(60000)
            .build();

    NimbusJwtDecoderJwkSupport jwtDecoder = new NimbusJwtDecoderJwkSupport(jwkSetUri);
    jwtDecoder.setRestOperations(rest);
    return jwtDecoder;
}

We have already seen an example of configuring in-memory authentication for a single user. Below is an example to configure multiple users:

@Bean
public UserDetailsService userDetailsService() throws Exception {
    // ensure the passwords are encoded properly
    UserBuilder users = User.withDefaultPasswordEncoder();
    InMemoryUserDetailsManager manager = new InMemoryUserDetailsManager();
    manager.createUser(users.username("user").password("password").roles("USER").build());
    manager.createUser(users.username("admin").password("password").roles("USER","ADMIN").build());
    return manager;
}

You can find the updates to support JDBC based authentication. The example below assumes that you have already defined a DataSource within your application. The jdbc-javaconfig sample provides a complete example of using JDBC based authentication.

@Autowired
private DataSource dataSource;

@Autowired
public void configureGlobal(AuthenticationManagerBuilder auth) throws Exception {
    // ensure the passwords are encoded properly
    UserBuilder users = User.withDefaultPasswordEncoder();
    auth
        .jdbcAuthentication()
            .dataSource(dataSource)
            .withDefaultSchema()
            .withUser(users.username("user").password("password").roles("USER"))
            .withUser(users.username("admin").password("password").roles("USER","ADMIN"));
}

You can find the updates to support LDAP based authentication. The ldap-javaconfig sample provides a complete example of using LDAP based authentication.

@Autowired
private DataSource dataSource;

@Autowired
public void configureGlobal(AuthenticationManagerBuilder auth) throws Exception {
    auth
        .ldapAuthentication()
            .userDnPatterns("uid={0},ou=people")
            .groupSearchBase("ou=groups");
}

The example above uses the following LDIF and an embedded Apache DS LDAP instance.

users.ldif. 

dn: ou=groups,dc=springframework,dc=org
objectclass: top
objectclass: organizationalUnit
ou: groups

dn: ou=people,dc=springframework,dc=org
objectclass: top
objectclass: organizationalUnit
ou: people

dn: uid=admin,ou=people,dc=springframework,dc=org
objectclass: top
objectclass: person
objectclass: organizationalPerson
objectclass: inetOrgPerson
cn: Rod Johnson
sn: Johnson
uid: admin
userPassword: password

dn: uid=user,ou=people,dc=springframework,dc=org
objectclass: top
objectclass: person
objectclass: organizationalPerson
objectclass: inetOrgPerson
cn: Dianne Emu
sn: Emu
uid: user
userPassword: password

dn: cn=user,ou=groups,dc=springframework,dc=org
objectclass: top
objectclass: groupOfNames
cn: user
uniqueMember: uid=admin,ou=people,dc=springframework,dc=org
uniqueMember: uid=user,ou=people,dc=springframework,dc=org

dn: cn=admin,ou=groups,dc=springframework,dc=org
objectclass: top
objectclass: groupOfNames
cn: admin
uniqueMember: uid=admin,ou=people,dc=springframework,dc=org

You can define custom authentication by exposing a custom AuthenticationProvider as a bean. For example, the following will customize authentication assuming that SpringAuthenticationProvider implements AuthenticationProvider:

	Note
	This is only used if the AuthenticationManagerBuilder has not been populated

@Bean
public SpringAuthenticationProvider springAuthenticationProvider() {
    return new SpringAuthenticationProvider();
}

You can define custom authentication by exposing a custom UserDetailsService as a bean. For example, the following will customize authentication assuming that SpringDataUserDetailsService implements UserDetailsService:

	Note
	This is only used if the AuthenticationManagerBuilder has not been populated and no AuthenticationProviderBean is defined.

@Bean
public SpringDataUserDetailsService springDataUserDetailsService() {
    return new SpringDataUserDetailsService();
}

You can also customize how passwords are encoded by exposing a PasswordEncoder as a bean. For example, if you use bcrypt you can add a bean definition as shown below:

@Bean
public BCryptPasswordEncoder passwordEncoder() {
    return new BCryptPasswordEncoder();
}

We can enable annotation-based security using the @EnableGlobalMethodSecurity annotation on any @Configuration instance. For example, the following would enable Spring Security’s @Secured annotation.

@EnableGlobalMethodSecurity(securedEnabled = true)
public class MethodSecurityConfig {
// ...
}

Adding an annotation to a method (on a class or interface) would then limit the access to that method accordingly. Spring Security’s native annotation support defines a set of attributes for the method. These will be passed to the AccessDecisionManager for it to make the actual decision:

public interface BankService {

@Secured("IS_AUTHENTICATED_ANONYMOUSLY")
public Account readAccount(Long id);

@Secured("IS_AUTHENTICATED_ANONYMOUSLY")
public Account[] findAccounts();

@Secured("ROLE_TELLER")
public Account post(Account account, double amount);
}

Support for JSR-250 annotations can be enabled using

@EnableGlobalMethodSecurity(jsr250Enabled = true)
public class MethodSecurityConfig {
// ...
}

These are standards-based and allow simple role-based constraints to be applied but do not have the power Spring Security’s native annotations. To use the new expression-based syntax, you would use

@EnableGlobalMethodSecurity(prePostEnabled = true)
public class MethodSecurityConfig {
// ...
}

and the equivalent Java code would be

public interface BankService {

@PreAuthorize("isAnonymous()")
public Account readAccount(Long id);

@PreAuthorize("isAnonymous()")
public Account[] findAccounts();

@PreAuthorize("hasAuthority('ROLE_TELLER')")
public Account post(Account account, double amount);
}

Sometimes you may need to perform operations that are more complicated than are possible with the @EnableGlobalMethodSecurity annotation allow. For these instances, you can extend the GlobalMethodSecurityConfiguration ensuring that the @EnableGlobalMethodSecurity annotation is present on your subclass. For example, if you wanted to provide a custom MethodSecurityExpressionHandler, you could use the following configuration:

@EnableGlobalMethodSecurity(prePostEnabled = true)
public class MethodSecurityConfig extends GlobalMethodSecurityConfiguration {
    @Override
    protected MethodSecurityExpressionHandler createExpressionHandler() {
        // ... create and return custom MethodSecurityExpressionHandler ...
        return expressionHandler;
    }
}

For additional information about methods that can be overridden, refer to the GlobalMethodSecurityConfiguration Javadoc.

The namespace is designed to capture the most common uses of the framework and provide a simplified and concise syntax for enabling them within an application. The design is based around the large-scale dependencies within the framework, and can be divided up into the following areas:

We’ll see how to configure these in the following sections.

The first thing you need to do is add the following filter declaration to your web.xml file:

<filter>
<filter-name>springSecurityFilterChain</filter-name>
<filter-class>org.springframework.web.filter.DelegatingFilterProxy</filter-class>
</filter>

<filter-mapping>
<filter-name>springSecurityFilterChain</filter-name>
<url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>

This provides a hook into the Spring Security web infrastructure. DelegatingFilterProxy is a Spring Framework class which delegates to a filter implementation which is defined as a Spring bean in your application context. In this case, the bean is named "springSecurityFilterChain", which is an internal infrastructure bean created by the namespace to handle web security. Note that you should not use this bean name yourself. Once you’ve added this to your web.xml, you’re ready to start editing your application context file. Web security services are configured using the <http> element.

All you need to enable web security to begin with is

<http>
<intercept-url pattern="/**" access="hasRole('USER')" />
<form-login />
<logout />
</http>

Which says that we want all URLs within our application to be secured, requiring the role ROLE_USER to access them, we want to log in to the application using a form with username and password, and that we want a logout URL registered which will allow us to log out of the application. <http> element is the parent for all web-related namespace functionality. The <intercept-url> element defines a pattern which is matched against the URLs of incoming requests using an ant path style syntax ^[2]. You can also use regular-expression matching as an alternative (see the namespace appendix for more details). The access attribute defines the access requirements for requests matching the given pattern. With the default configuration, this is typically a comma-separated list of roles, one of which a user must have to be allowed to make the request. The prefix "ROLE_" is a marker which indicates that a simple comparison with the user’s authorities should be made. In other words, a normal role-based check should be used. Access-control in Spring Security is not limited to the use of simple roles (hence the use of the prefix to differentiate between different types of security attributes). We’ll see later how the interpretation can vary ^[3]. In Spring Security 3.0, the attribute can also be populated with an –1—.

	Note
	===

You can use multiple <intercept-url> elements to define different access requirements for different sets of URLs, but they will be evaluated in the order listed and the first match will be used. So you must put the most specific matches at the top. You can also add a method attribute to limit the match to a particular HTTP method (GET, POST, PUT etc.).

===

To add some users, you can define a set of test data directly in the namespace:

<authentication-manager>
<authentication-provider>
    <user-service>
    <!-- Password is prefixed with {noop} to indicate to DelegatingPasswordEncoder that
    NoOpPasswordEncoder should be used. This is not safe for production, but makes reading
    in samples easier. Normally passwords should be hashed using BCrypt -->
    <user name="jimi" password="{noop}jimispassword" authorities="ROLE_USER, ROLE_ADMIN" />
    <user name="bob" password="{noop}bobspassword" authorities="ROLE_USER" />
    </user-service>
</authentication-provider>
</authentication-manager>

This is an example of a secure way of storing the same passwords. The password is prefixed with {bcrypt} to instruct DelegatingPasswordEncoder, which supports any configured PasswordEncoder for matching, that the passwords are hashed using BCrypt:

<authentication-manager>
<authentication-provider>
    <user-service>
    <user name="jimi" password="{bcrypt}$2a$10$ddEWZUl8aU0GdZPPpy7wbu82dvEw/pBpbRvDQRqA41y6mK1CoH00m"
            authorities="ROLE_USER, ROLE_ADMIN" />
    <user name="bob" password="{bcrypt}$2a$10$/elFpMBnAYYig6KRR5bvOOYeZr1ie1hSogJryg9qDlhza4oCw1Qka"
            authorities="ROLE_USER" />
    <user name="jimi" password="{noop}jimispassword" authorities="ROLE_USER, ROLE_ADMIN" />
    <user name="bob" password="{noop}bobspassword" authorities="ROLE_USER" />
    </user-service>
</authentication-provider>
</authentication-manager>

The configuration above defines two users, their passwords and their roles within the application (which will be used for access control). It is also possible to load user information from a standard properties file using the properties attribute on user-service. See the section on in-memory authentication for more details on the file format. Using the <authentication-provider> element means that the user information will be used by the authentication manager to process authentication requests. You can have multiple <authentication-provider> elements to define different authentication sources and each will be consulted in turn.

At this point you should be able to start up your application and you will be required to log in to proceed. Try it out, or try experimenting with the "tutorial" sample application that comes with the project.

You might be wondering where the login form came from when you were prompted to log in, since we made no mention of any HTML files or JSPs. In fact, since we didn’t explicitly set a URL for the login page, Spring Security generates one automatically, based on the features that are enabled and using standard values for the URL which processes the submitted login, the default target URL the user will be sent to after logging in and so on. However, the namespace offers plenty of support to allow you to customize these options. For example, if you want to supply your own login page, you could use:

<http>
<intercept-url pattern="/login.jsp*" access="IS_AUTHENTICATED_ANONYMOUSLY"/>
<intercept-url pattern="/**" access="ROLE_USER" />
<form-login login-page='/login.jsp'/>
</http>

Also note that we’ve added an extra intercept-url element to say that any requests for the login page should be available to anonymous users ^[4] and also the AuthenticatedVoter class for more details on how the value IS_AUTHENTICATED_ANONYMOUSLY is processed.]. Otherwise the request would be matched by the pattern /** and it wouldn’t be possible to access the login page itself! This is a common configuration error and will result in an infinite loop in the application. Spring Security will emit a warning in the log if your login page appears to be secured. It is also possible to have all requests matching a particular pattern bypass the security filter chain completely, by defining a separate http element for the pattern like this:

<http pattern="/css/**" security="none"/>
<http pattern="/login.jsp*" security="none"/>

<http use-expressions="false">
<intercept-url pattern="/**" access="ROLE_USER" />
<form-login login-page='/login.jsp'/>
</http>

From Spring Security 3.1 it is now possible to use multiple http elements to define separate security filter chain configurations for different request patterns. If the pattern attribute is omitted from an http element, it matches all requests. Creating an unsecured pattern is a simple example of this syntax, where the pattern is mapped to an empty filter chain ^[5]. We’ll look at this new syntax in more detail in the chapter on the Security Filter Chain.

It’s important to realise that these unsecured requests will be completely oblivious to any Spring Security web-related configuration or additional attributes such as requires-channel, so you will not be able to access information on the current user or call secured methods during the request. Use access='IS_AUTHENTICATED_ANONYMOUSLY' as an alternative if you still want the security filter chain to be applied.

If you want to use basic authentication instead of form login, then change the configuration to

<http use-expressions="false">
<intercept-url pattern="/**" access="ROLE_USER" />
<http-basic />
</http>

Basic authentication will then take precedence and will be used to prompt for a login when a user attempts to access a protected resource. Form login is still available in this configuration if you wish to use it, for example through a login form embedded in another web page.

<http pattern="/login.htm*" security="none"/>
<http use-expressions="false">
<intercept-url pattern='/**' access='ROLE_USER' />
<form-login login-page='/login.htm' default-target-url='/home.htm'
        always-use-default-target='true' />
</http>

The logout element adds support for logging out by navigating to a particular URL. The default logout URL is /logout, but you can set it to something else using the logout-url attribute. More information on other available attributes may be found in the namespace appendix.

In practice you will need a more scalable source of user information than a few names added to the application context file. Most likely you will want to store your user information in something like a database or an LDAP server. LDAP namespace configuration is dealt with in the LDAP chapter, so we won’t cover it here. If you have a custom implementation of Spring Security’s UserDetailsService, called "myUserDetailsService" in your application context, then you can authenticate against this using

<authentication-manager>
    <authentication-provider user-service-ref='myUserDetailsService'/>
</authentication-manager>

If you want to use a database, then you can use

<authentication-manager>
<authentication-provider>
    <jdbc-user-service data-source-ref="securityDataSource"/>
</authentication-provider>
</authentication-manager>

Where "securityDataSource" is the name of a DataSource bean in the application context, pointing at a database containing the standard Spring Security user data tables. Alternatively, you could configure a Spring Security JdbcDaoImpl bean and point at that using the user-service-ref attribute:

<authentication-manager>
<authentication-provider user-service-ref='myUserDetailsService'/>
</authentication-manager>

<beans:bean id="myUserDetailsService"
    class="org.springframework.security.core.userdetails.jdbc.JdbcDaoImpl">
<beans:property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource"/>
</beans:bean>

You can also use standard AuthenticationProvider beans as follows

<authentication-manager>
    <authentication-provider ref='myAuthenticationProvider'/>
</authentication-manager>

where myAuthenticationProvider is the name of a bean in your application context which implements AuthenticationProvider. You can use multiple authentication-provider elements, in which case the providers will be queried in the order they are declared. See Section 7.6, “The Authentication Manager and the Namespace” for more information on how the Spring Security AuthenticationManager is configured using the namespace.

<beans:bean name="bcryptEncoder"
    class="org.springframework.security.crypto.bcrypt.BCryptPasswordEncoder"/>

<authentication-manager>
<authentication-provider>
    <password-encoder ref="bcryptEncoder"/>
    <user-service>
    <user name="jimi" password="$2a$10$ddEWZUl8aU0GdZPPpy7wbu82dvEw/pBpbRvDQRqA41y6mK1CoH00m"
            authorities="ROLE_USER, ROLE_ADMIN" />
    <user name="bob" password="$2a$10$/elFpMBnAYYig6KRR5bvOOYeZr1ie1hSogJryg9qDlhza4oCw1Qka"
            authorities="ROLE_USER" />
    </user-service>
</authentication-provider>
</authentication-manager>

See the separate Remember-Me chapter for information on remember-me namespace configuration.

If your application supports both HTTP and HTTPS, and you require that particular URLs can only be accessed over HTTPS, then this is directly supported using the requires-channel attribute on <intercept-url>:

<http>
<intercept-url pattern="/secure/**" access="ROLE_USER" requires-channel="https"/>
<intercept-url pattern="/**" access="ROLE_USER" requires-channel="any"/>
...
</http>

With this configuration in place, if a user attempts to access anything matching the "/secure/**" pattern using HTTP, they will first be redirected to an HTTPS URL ^[6]. The available options are "http", "https" or "any". Using the value "any" means that either HTTP or HTTPS can be used.

If your application uses non-standard ports for HTTP and/or HTTPS, you can specify a list of port mappings as follows:

<http>
...
<port-mappings>
    <port-mapping http="9080" https="9443"/>
</port-mappings>
</http>

Note that in order to be truly secure, an application should not use HTTP at all or switch between HTTP and HTTPS. It should start in HTTPS (with the user entering an HTTPS URL) and use a secure connection throughout to avoid any possibility of man-in-the-middle attacks.

The namespace supports OpenID login either instead of, or in addition to normal form-based login, with a simple change:

<http>
<intercept-url pattern="/**" access="ROLE_USER" />
<openid-login />
</http>

You should then register yourself with an OpenID provider (such as myopenid.com), and add the user information to your in-memory <user-service>:

<user name="https://jimi.hendrix.myopenid.com/" authorities="ROLE_USER" />

You should be able to login using the myopenid.com site to authenticate. It is also possible to select a specific UserDetailsService bean for use OpenID by setting the user-service-ref attribute on the openid-login element. See the previous section on authentication providers for more information. Note that we have omitted the password attribute from the above user configuration, since this set of user data is only being used to load the authorities for the user. A random password will be generated internally, preventing you from accidentally using this user data as an authentication source elsewhere in your configuration.

<openid-login>
<attribute-exchange>
    <openid-attribute name="email" type="https://axschema.org/contact/email" required="true"/>
    <openid-attribute name="name" type="https://axschema.org/namePerson"/>
</attribute-exchange>
</openid-login>

OpenIDAuthenticationToken token =
    (OpenIDAuthenticationToken)SecurityContextHolder.getContext().getAuthentication();
List<OpenIDAttribute> attributes = token.getAttributes();

For additional information on how to customize the headers element refer to the Section 10.8, “Security HTTP Response Headers” section of the reference.

If you’ve used Spring Security before, you’ll know that the framework maintains a chain of filters in order to apply its services. You may want to add your own filters to the stack at particular locations or use a Spring Security filter for which there isn’t currently a namespace configuration option (CAS, for example). Or you might want to use a customized version of a standard namespace filter, such as the UsernamePasswordAuthenticationFilter which is created by the <form-login> element, taking advantage of some of the extra configuration options which are available by using the bean explicitly. How can you do this with namespace configuration, since the filter chain is not directly exposed?

The order of the filters is always strictly enforced when using the namespace. When the application context is being created, the filter beans are sorted by the namespace handling code and the standard Spring Security filters each have an alias in the namespace and a well-known position.

Note

=== In previous versions, the sorting took place after the filter instances had been created, during post-processing of the application context. In version 3.0+ the sorting is now done at the bean metadata level, before the classes have been instantiated. This has implications for how you add your own filters to the stack as the entire filter list must be known during the parsing of the <http> element, so the syntax has changed slightly in 3.0. ===

The filters, aliases and namespace elements/attributes which create the filters are shown in Table 7.1, “Standard Filter Aliases and Ordering”. The filters are listed in the order in which they occur in the filter chain.

You can add your own filter to the stack, using the custom-filter element and one of these names to specify the position your filter should appear at:

<http>
<custom-filter position="FORM_LOGIN_FILTER" ref="myFilter" />
</http>

<beans:bean id="myFilter" class="com.mycompany.MySpecialAuthenticationFilter"/>

You can also use the after or before attributes if you want your filter to be inserted before or after another filter in the stack. The names "FIRST" and "LAST" can be used with the position attribute to indicate that you want your filter to appear before or after the entire stack, respectively.

	Avoiding filter position conflicts
	===

If you are inserting a custom filter which may occupy the same position as one of the standard filters created by the namespace then it’s important that you don’t include the namespace versions by mistake. Remove any elements which create filters whose functionality you want to replace.

Note that you can’t replace filters which are created by the use of the <http> element itself - SecurityContextPersistenceFilter, ExceptionTranslationFilter or FilterSecurityInterceptor. Some other filters are added by default, but you can disable them. An AnonymousAuthenticationFilter is added by default and unless you have session-fixation protection disabled, a SessionManagementFilter will also be added to the filter chain.

===

If you’re replacing a namespace filter which requires an authentication entry point (i.e. where the authentication process is triggered by an attempt by an unauthenticated user to access to a secured resource), you will need to add a custom entry point bean too.

This element is used to enable annotation-based security in your application (by setting the appropriate attributes on the element), and also to group together security pointcut declarations which will be applied across your entire application context. You should only declare one <global-method-security> element. The following declaration would enable support for Spring Security’s @Secured:

<global-method-security secured-annotations="enabled" />

Adding an annotation to a method (on an class or interface) would then limit the access to that method accordingly. Spring Security’s native annotation support defines a set of attributes for the method. These will be passed to the AccessDecisionManager for it to make the actual decision:

public interface BankService {

@Secured("IS_AUTHENTICATED_ANONYMOUSLY")
public Account readAccount(Long id);

@Secured("IS_AUTHENTICATED_ANONYMOUSLY")
public Account[] findAccounts();

@Secured("ROLE_TELLER")
public Account post(Account account, double amount);
}

Support for JSR-250 annotations can be enabled using

<global-method-security jsr250-annotations="enabled" />

These are standards-based and allow simple role-based constraints to be applied but do not have the power Spring Security’s native annotations. To use the new expression-based syntax, you would use

<global-method-security pre-post-annotations="enabled" />

and the equivalent Java code would be

public interface BankService {

@PreAuthorize("isAnonymous()")
public Account readAccount(Long id);

@PreAuthorize("isAnonymous()")
public Account[] findAccounts();

@PreAuthorize("hasAuthority('ROLE_TELLER')")
public Account post(Account account, double amount);
}

Expression-based annotations are a good choice if you need to define simple rules that go beyond checking the role names against the user’s list of authorities.

	Note
	=== The annotated methods will only be secured for instances which are defined as Spring beans (in the same application context in which method-security is enabled). If you want to secure instances which are not created by Spring (using the new operator, for example) then you need to use AspectJ. ===

	Note
	=== You can enable more than one type of annotation in the same application, but only one type should be used for any interface or class as the behaviour will not be well-defined otherwise. If two annotations are found which apply to a particular method, then only one of them will be applied. ===

<global-method-security>
<protect-pointcut expression="execution(* com.mycompany.*Service.*(..))"
    access="ROLE_USER"/>
</global-method-security>

If you need to use a more complicated access control strategy then it is easy to set an alternative for both method and web security.

For method security, you do this by setting the access-decision-manager-ref attribute on global-method-security to the id of the appropriate AccessDecisionManager bean in the application context:

<global-method-security access-decision-manager-ref="myAccessDecisionManagerBean">
...
</global-method-security>

The syntax for web security is the same, but on the http element:

<http access-decision-manager-ref="myAccessDecisionManagerBean">
...
</http>

Spring Security 3.0 requires a Java 5.0 Runtime Environment or higher. As Spring Security aims to operate in a self-contained manner, there is no need to place any special configuration files into your Java Runtime Environment. In particular, there is no need to configure a special Java Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS) policy file or place Spring Security into common classpath locations.

Similarly, if you are using an EJB Container or Servlet Container there is no need to put any special configuration files anywhere, nor include Spring Security in a server classloader. All the required files will be contained within your application.

This design offers maximum deployment time flexibility, as you can simply copy your target artifact (be it a JAR, WAR or EAR) from one system to another and it will immediately work.

In Spring Security 3.0, the contents of the spring-security-core jar were stripped down to the bare minimum. It no longer contains any code related to web-application security, LDAP or namespace configuration. We’ll take a look here at some of the Java types that you’ll find in the core module. They represent the building blocks of the framework, so if you ever need to go beyond a simple namespace configuration then it’s important that you understand what they are, even if you don’t actually need to interact with them directly.

Object principal = SecurityContextHolder.getContext().getAuthentication().getPrincipal();

if (principal instanceof UserDetails) {
String username = ((UserDetails)principal).getUsername();
} else {
String username = principal.toString();
}

The UserDetailsService

Another item to note from the above code fragment is that you can obtain a principal from the Authentication object. The principal is just an Object. Most of the time this can be cast into a UserDetails object. UserDetails is a core interface in Spring Security. It represents a principal, but in an extensible and application-specific way. Think of UserDetails as the adapter between your own user database and what Spring Security needs inside the SecurityContextHolder. Being a representation of something from your own user database, quite often you will cast the UserDetails to the original object that your application provided, so you can call business-specific methods (like getEmail(), getEmployeeNumber() and so on).

By now you’re probably wondering, so when do I provide a UserDetails object? How do I do that? I thought you said this thing was declarative and I didn’t need to write any Java code - what gives? The short answer is that there is a special interface called UserDetailsService. The only method on this interface accepts a String-based username argument and returns a UserDetails:

UserDetails loadUserByUsername(String username) throws UsernameNotFoundException;

This is the most common approach to loading information for a user within Spring Security and you will see it used throughout the framework whenever information on a user is required.

On successful authentication, UserDetails is used to build the Authentication object that is stored in the SecurityContextHolder (more on this below). The good news is that we provide a number of UserDetailsService implementations, including one that uses an in-memory map (InMemoryDaoImpl) and another that uses JDBC (JdbcDaoImpl). Most users tend to write their own, though, with their implementations often simply sitting on top of an existing Data Access Object (DAO) that represents their employees, customers, or other users of the application. Remember the advantage that whatever your UserDetailsService returns can always be obtained from the SecurityContextHolder using the above code fragment.

Note

There is often some confusion about UserDetailsService. It is purely a DAO for user data and performs no other function other than to supply that data to other components within the framework. In particular, it does not authenticate the user, which is done by the AuthenticationManager. In many cases it makes more sense to implement AuthenticationProvider directly if you require a custom authentication process.

Spring Security can participate in many different authentication environments. While we recommend people use Spring Security for authentication and not integrate with existing Container Managed Authentication, it is nevertheless supported - as is integrating with your own proprietary authentication system.

import org.springframework.security.authentication.*;
import org.springframework.security.core.*;
import org.springframework.security.core.authority.SimpleGrantedAuthority;
import org.springframework.security.core.context.SecurityContextHolder;

public class AuthenticationExample {
private static AuthenticationManager am = new SampleAuthenticationManager();

public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in));

    while(true) {
    System.out.println("Please enter your username:");
    String name = in.readLine();
    System.out.println("Please enter your password:");
    String password = in.readLine();
    try {
        Authentication request = new UsernamePasswordAuthenticationToken(name, password);
        Authentication result = am.authenticate(request);
        SecurityContextHolder.getContext().setAuthentication(result);
        break;
    } catch(AuthenticationException e) {
        System.out.println("Authentication failed: " + e.getMessage());
    }
    }
    System.out.println("Successfully authenticated. Security context contains: " +
            SecurityContextHolder.getContext().getAuthentication());
}
}

class SampleAuthenticationManager implements AuthenticationManager {
static final List<GrantedAuthority> AUTHORITIES = new ArrayList<GrantedAuthority>();

static {
    AUTHORITIES.add(new SimpleGrantedAuthority("ROLE_USER"));
}

public Authentication authenticate(Authentication auth) throws AuthenticationException {
    if (auth.getName().equals(auth.getCredentials())) {
    return new UsernamePasswordAuthenticationToken(auth.getName(),
        auth.getCredentials(), AUTHORITIES);
    }
    throw new BadCredentialsException("Bad Credentials");
}
}

Please enter your username:
bob
Please enter your password:
password
Authentication failed: Bad Credentials
Please enter your username:
bob
Please enter your password:
bob
Successfully authenticated. Security context contains: \
org.springframework.security.authentication.UsernamePasswordAuthenticationToken@441d0230: \
Principal: bob; Password: [PROTECTED]; \
Authenticated: true; Details: null; \
Granted Authorities: ROLE_USER

Now let’s explore the situation where you are using Spring Security in a web application (without web.xml security enabled). How is a user authenticated and the security context established?

Consider a typical web application’s authentication process:

Spring Security has distinct classes responsible for most of the steps described above. The main participants (in the order that they are used) are the ExceptionTranslationFilter, an AuthenticationEntryPoint and an "authentication mechanism", which is responsible for calling the AuthenticationManager which we saw in the previous section.

Storing the SecurityContext between requests

Depending on the type of application, there may need to be a strategy in place to store the security context between user operations. In a typical web application, a user logs in once and is subsequently identified by their session Id. The server caches the principal information for the duration session. In Spring Security, the responsibility for storing the SecurityContext between requests falls to the SecurityContextPersistenceFilter, which by default stores the context as an HttpSession attribute between HTTP requests. It restores the context to the SecurityContextHolder for each request and, crucially, clears the SecurityContextHolder when the request completes. You shouldn’t interact directly with the HttpSession for security purposes. There is simply no justification for doing so - always use the SecurityContextHolder instead.

Many other types of application (for example, a stateless RESTful web service) do not use HTTP sessions and will re-authenticate on every request. However, it is still important that the SecurityContextPersistenceFilter is included in the chain to make sure that the SecurityContextHolder is cleared after each request.

Note

In an application which receives concurrent requests in a single session, the same SecurityContext instance will be shared between threads. Even though a ThreadLocal is being used, it is the same instance that is retrieved from the HttpSession for each thread. This has implications if you wish to temporarily change the context under which a thread is running. If you just use SecurityContextHolder.getContext(), and call setAuthentication(anAuthentication) on the returned context object, then the Authentication object will change in all concurrent threads which share the same SecurityContext instance. You can customize the behaviour of SecurityContextPersistenceFilter to create a completely new SecurityContext for each request, preventing changes in one thread from affecting another. Alternatively you can create a new instance just at the point where you temporarily change the context. The method SecurityContextHolder.createEmptyContext() always returns a new context instance.

The main interface responsible for making access-control decisions in Spring Security is the AccessDecisionManager. It has a decide method which takes an Authentication object representing the principal requesting access, a "secure object" (see below) and a list of security metadata attributes which apply for the object (such as a list of roles which are required for access to be granted).

Secure Objects and the AbstractSecurityInterceptor

So what is a "secure object" anyway? Spring Security uses the term to refer to any object that can have security (such as an authorization decision) applied to it. The most common examples are method invocations and web requests.

Each supported secure object type has its own interceptor class, which is a subclass of AbstractSecurityInterceptor. Importantly, by the time the AbstractSecurityInterceptor is called, the SecurityContextHolder will contain a valid Authentication if the principal has been authenticated.

AbstractSecurityInterceptor provides a consistent workflow for handling secure object requests, typically:

1. Look up the "configuration attributes" associated with the present request
2. Submitting the secure object, current Authentication and configuration attributes to the AccessDecisionManager for an authorization decision
3. Optionally change the Authentication under which the invocation takes place
4. Allow the secure object invocation to proceed (assuming access was granted)
5. Call the AfterInvocationManager if configured, once the invocation has returned. If the invocation raised an exception, the AfterInvocationManager will not be invoked.

What are Configuration Attributes?

A "configuration attribute" can be thought of as a String that has special meaning to the classes used by AbstractSecurityInterceptor. They are represented by the interface ConfigAttribute within the framework. They may be simple role names or have more complex meaning, depending on the how sophisticated the AccessDecisionManager implementation is. The AbstractSecurityInterceptor is configured with a SecurityMetadataSource which it uses to look up the attributes for a secure object. Usually this configuration will be hidden from the user. Configuration attributes will be entered as annotations on secured methods or as access attributes on secured URLs. For example, when we saw something like <intercept-url pattern='/secure/**' access='ROLE_A,ROLE_B'/> in the namespace introduction, this is saying that the configuration attributes ROLE_A and ROLE_B apply to web requests matching the given pattern. In practice, with the default AccessDecisionManager configuration, this means that anyone who has a GrantedAuthority matching either of these two attributes will be allowed access. Strictly speaking though, they are just attributes and the interpretation is dependent on the AccessDecisionManager implementation. The use of the prefix ROLE_ is a marker to indicate that these attributes are roles and should be consumed by Spring Security’s RoleVoter. This is only relevant when a voter-based AccessDecisionManager is in use. We’ll see how the AccessDecisionManager is implemented in the authorization chapter.

RunAsManager

Assuming AccessDecisionManager decides to allow the request, the AbstractSecurityInterceptor will normally just proceed with the request. Having said that, on rare occasions users may want to replace the Authentication inside the SecurityContext with a different Authentication, which is handled by the AccessDecisionManager calling a RunAsManager. This might be useful in reasonably unusual situations, such as if a services layer method needs to call a remote system and present a different identity. Because Spring Security automatically propagates security identity from one server to another (assuming you’re using a properly-configured RMI or HttpInvoker remoting protocol client), this may be useful.

AfterInvocationManager

Following the secure object invocation proceeding and then returning - which may mean a method invocation completing or a filter chain proceeding - the AbstractSecurityInterceptor gets one final chance to handle the invocation. At this stage the AbstractSecurityInterceptor is interested in possibly modifying the return object. We might want this to happen because an authorization decision couldn’t be made "on the way in" to a secure object invocation. Being highly pluggable, AbstractSecurityInterceptor will pass control to an AfterInvocationManager to actually modify the object if needed. This class can even entirely replace the object, or throw an exception, or not change it in any way as it chooses. The after-invocation checks will only be executed if the invocation is successful. If an exception occurs, the additional checks will be skipped.

AbstractSecurityInterceptor and its related objects are shown in Figure 8.1, “Security interceptors and the "secure object" model”

Figure 8.1. Security interceptors and the "secure object" model

Extending the Secure Object Model

Only developers contemplating an entirely new way of intercepting and authorizing requests would need to use secure objects directly. For example, it would be possible to build a new secure object to secure calls to a messaging system. Anything that requires security and also provides a way of intercepting a call (like the AOP around advice semantics) is capable of being made into a secure object. Having said that, most Spring applications will simply use the three currently supported secure object types (AOP Alliance MethodInvocation, AspectJ JoinPoint and web request FilterInvocation) with complete transparency.

Spring Security supports localization of exception messages that end users are likely to see. If your application is designed for English-speaking users, you don’t need to do anything as by default all Security messages are in English. If you need to support other locales, everything you need to know is contained in this section.

All exception messages can be localized, including messages related to authentication failures and access being denied (authorization failures). Exceptions and logging messages that are focused on developers or system deployers (including incorrect attributes, interface contract violations, using incorrect constructors, startup time validation, debug-level logging) are not localized and instead are hard-coded in English within Spring Security’s code.

Shipping in the spring-security-core-xx.jar you will find an org.springframework.security package that in turn contains a messages.properties file, as well as localized versions for some common languages. This should be referred to by your ApplicationContext, as Spring Security classes implement Spring’s MessageSourceAware interface and expect the message resolver to be dependency injected at application context startup time. Usually all you need to do is register a bean inside your application context to refer to the messages. An example is shown below:

<bean id="messageSource"
    class="org.springframework.context.support.ReloadableResourceBundleMessageSource">
<property name="basename" value="classpath:org/springframework/security/messages"/>
</bean>

The messages.properties is named in accordance with standard resource bundles and represents the default language supported by Spring Security messages. This default file is in English.

If you wish to customize the messages.properties file, or support other languages, you should copy the file, rename it accordingly, and register it inside the above bean definition. There are not a large number of message keys inside this file, so localization should not be considered a major initiative. If you do perform localization of this file, please consider sharing your work with the community by logging a JIRA task and attaching your appropriately-named localized version of messages.properties.

Spring Security relies on Spring’s localization support in order to actually lookup the appropriate message. In order for this to work, you have to make sure that the locale from the incoming request is stored in Spring’s org.springframework.context.i18n.LocaleContextHolder. Spring MVC’s DispatcherServlet does this for your application automatically, but since Spring Security’s filters are invoked before this, the LocaleContextHolder needs to be set up to contain the correct Locale before the filters are called. You can either do this in a filter yourself (which must come before the Spring Security filters in web.xml) or you can use Spring’s RequestContextFilter. Please refer to the Spring Framework documentation for further details on using localization with Spring.

The "contacts" sample application is set up to use localized messages.

The AuthenticationManager is just an interface, so the implementation can be anything we choose, but how does it work in practice? What if we need to check multiple authentication databases or a combination of different authentication services such as a database and an LDAP server?

The default implementation in Spring Security is called ProviderManager and rather than handling the authentication request itself, it delegates to a list of configured AuthenticationProvider s, each of which is queried in turn to see if it can perform the authentication. Each provider will either throw an exception or return a fully populated Authentication object. Remember our good friends, UserDetails and UserDetailsService? If not, head back to the previous chapter and refresh your memory. The most common approach to verifying an authentication request is to load the corresponding UserDetails and check the loaded password against the one that has been entered by the user. This is the approach used by the DaoAuthenticationProvider (see below). The loaded UserDetails object - and particularly the GrantedAuthority s it contains - will be used when building the fully populated Authentication object which is returned from a successful authentication and stored in the SecurityContext.

If you are using the namespace, an instance of ProviderManager is created and maintained internally, and you add providers to it by using the namespace authentication provider elements (see the namespace chapter). In this case, you should not declare a ProviderManager bean in your application context. However, if you are not using the namespace then you would declare it like so:

<bean id="authenticationManager"
        class="org.springframework.security.authentication.ProviderManager">
    <constructor-arg>
        <list>
            <ref local="daoAuthenticationProvider"/>
            <ref local="anonymousAuthenticationProvider"/>
            <ref local="ldapAuthenticationProvider"/>
        </list>
    </constructor-arg>
</bean>

In the above example we have three providers. They are tried in the order shown (which is implied by the use of a List), with each provider able to attempt authentication, or skip authentication by simply returning null. If all implementations return null, the ProviderManager will throw a ProviderNotFoundException. If you’re interested in learning more about chaining providers, please refer to the ProviderManager Javadoc.

Authentication mechanisms such as a web form-login processing filter are injected with a reference to the ProviderManager and will call it to handle their authentication requests. The providers you require will sometimes be interchangeable with the authentication mechanisms, while at other times they will depend on a specific authentication mechanism. For example, DaoAuthenticationProvider and LdapAuthenticationProvider are compatible with any mechanism which submits a simple username/password authentication request and so will work with form-based logins or HTTP Basic authentication. On the other hand, some authentication mechanisms create an authentication request object which can only be interpreted by a single type of AuthenticationProvider. An example of this would be JA-SIG CAS, which uses the notion of a service ticket and so can therefore only be authenticated by a CasAuthenticationProvider. You needn’t be too concerned about this, because if you forget to register a suitable provider, you’ll simply receive a ProviderNotFoundException when an attempt to authenticate is made.

<bean id="daoAuthenticationProvider"
    class="org.springframework.security.authentication.dao.DaoAuthenticationProvider">
<property name="userDetailsService" ref="inMemoryDaoImpl"/>
<property name="passwordEncoder" ref="passwordEncoder"/>
</bean>

As mentioned in the earlier in this reference guide, most authentication providers take advantage of the UserDetails and UserDetailsService interfaces. Recall that the contract for UserDetailsService is a single method:

UserDetails loadUserByUsername(String username) throws UsernameNotFoundException;

The returned UserDetails is an interface that provides getters that guarantee non-null provision of authentication information such as the username, password, granted authorities and whether the user account is enabled or disabled. Most authentication providers will use a UserDetailsService, even if the username and password are not actually used as part of the authentication decision. They may use the returned UserDetails object just for its GrantedAuthority information, because some other system (like LDAP or X.509 or CAS etc) has undertaken the responsibility of actually validating the credentials.

Given UserDetailsService is so simple to implement, it should be easy for users to retrieve authentication information using a persistence strategy of their choice. Having said that, Spring Security does include a couple of useful base implementations, which we’ll look at below.

<user-service id="userDetailsService">
<!-- Password is prefixed with {noop} to indicate to DelegatingPasswordEncoder that
NoOpPasswordEncoder should be used. This is not safe for production, but makes reading
in samples easier. Normally passwords should be hashed using BCrypt -->
<user name="jimi" password="{noop}jimispassword" authorities="ROLE_USER, ROLE_ADMIN" />
<user name="bob" password="{noop}bobspassword" authorities="ROLE_USER" />
</user-service>

<user-service id="userDetailsService" properties="users.properties"/>

username=password,grantedAuthority[,grantedAuthority][,enabled|disabled]

jimi=jimispassword,ROLE_USER,ROLE_ADMIN,enabled
bob=bobspassword,ROLE_USER,enabled

<bean id="dataSource" class="org.springframework.jdbc.datasource.DriverManagerDataSource">
<property name="driverClassName" value="org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver"/>
<property name="url" value="jdbc:hsqldb:hsql://localhost:9001"/>
<property name="username" value="sa"/>
<property name="password" value=""/>
</bean>

<bean id="userDetailsService"
    class="org.springframework.security.core.userdetails.jdbc.JdbcDaoImpl">
<property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource"/>
</bean>