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:

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:

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:

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

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

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

Spring Security builds against Spring Framework 5.1.5.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 5.1.5.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 will ensure that all the transitive dependencies of Spring Security use the Spring 5.1.5.RELEASE modules.

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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

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

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

Spring Security builds against Spring Framework 5.1.5.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 5.1.5.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.

This will ensure that all the transitive dependencies of Spring Security use the Spring 5.1.5.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.

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

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:

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:

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:

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()

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 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:

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

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.

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:

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.

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:

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.

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).

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:

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.

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

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.

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.

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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.

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:

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).

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:

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:

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:

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().

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:

Or similarly with method security:

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.

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.

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:

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

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.

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

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

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:

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:

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:

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.

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:

Support for JSR-250 annotations can be enabled using

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

and the equivalent Java code would be

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:

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:

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

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 footnote:[The interpretation of the comma-separated values in the access attribute depends on the implementation of the –1— which is used. In Spring Security 3.0, the attribute can also be populated with an –2—.

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.).

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

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:

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:

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 ^[3] 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:

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 ^[4]. 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

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.

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

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

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:

You can also use standard AuthenticationProvider beans as follows

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 The Authentication Manager and the Namespace for more information on how the Spring Security AuthenticationManager is configured using the namespace.

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>:

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 ^[5]. 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:

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:

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

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.

For additional information on how to customize the headers element refer to the 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.

The filters, aliases and namespace elements/attributes which create the filters are shown in 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:

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.

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.

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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:

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:

Support for JSR-250 annotations can be enabled using

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

and the equivalent Java code would be

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.

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:

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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:

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:

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.

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:

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.

Spring Security’s PasswordEncoder interface is used to perform a one way transformation of a password to allow the password to be stored securely. Given PasswordEncoder is a one way transformation, it is not intended when the password transformation needs to be two way (i.e. storing credentials used to authenticate to a database). Typically PasswordEncoder is used for storing a password that needs to be compared to a user provided password at the time of authentication.

Spring Security has added Jackson Support for persisting Spring Security related classes. This can improve the performance of serializing Spring Security related classes when working with distributed sessions (i.e. session replication, Spring Session, etc).

To use it, register the SecurityJackson2Modules.getModules(ClassLoader) as Jackson Modules.

Before we can use Spring Security Test support, we must perform some setup. An example can be seen below:

This is a basic example of how to setup Spring Security Test. The highlights are:

Remember we added the @PreAuthorize annotation to our HelloMessageService and so it requires an authenticated user to invoke it. If we ran the following test, we would expect the following test will pass:

The question is "How could we most easily run the test as a specific user?" The answer is to use @WithMockUser. The following test will be run as a user with the username "user", the password "password", and the roles "ROLE_USER".

Specifically the following is true:

Our example is nice because we are able to leverage a lot of defaults. What if we wanted to run the test with a different username? The following test would run with the username "customUser". Again, the user does not need to actually exist.

We can also easily customize the roles. For example, this test will be invoked with the username "admin" and the roles "ROLE_USER" and "ROLE_ADMIN".

If we do not want the value to automatically be prefixed with ROLE_ we can leverage the authorities attribute. For example, this test will be invoked with the username "admin" and the authorities "USER" and "ADMIN".

Of course it can be a bit tedious placing the annotation on every test method. Instead, we can place the annotation at the class level and every test will use the specified user. For example, the following would run every test with a user with the username "admin", the password "password", and the roles "ROLE_USER" and "ROLE_ADMIN".

By default the SecurityContext is set during the TestExecutionListener.beforeTestMethod event. This is the equivalent of happening before JUnit’s @Before. You can change this to happen during the TestExecutionListener.beforeTestExecution event which is after JUnit’s @Before but before the test method is invoked.

Using @WithAnonymousUser allows running as an anonymous user. This is especially convenient when you wish to run most of your tests with a specific user, but want to run a few tests as an anonymous user. For example, the following will run withMockUser1 and withMockUser2 using @WithMockUser and anonymous as an anonymous user.

By default the SecurityContext is set during the TestExecutionListener.beforeTestMethod event. This is the equivalent of happening before JUnit’s @Before. You can change this to happen during the TestExecutionListener.beforeTestExecution event which is after JUnit’s @Before but before the test method is invoked.

While @WithMockUser is a very convenient way to get started, it may not work in all instances. For example, it is common for applications to expect that the Authentication principal be of a specific type. This is done so that the application can refer to the principal as the custom type and reduce coupling on Spring Security.

The custom principal is often times returned by a custom UserDetailsService that returns an object that implements both UserDetails and the custom type. For situations like this, it is useful to create the test user using the custom UserDetailsService. That is exactly what @WithUserDetails does.

Assuming we have a UserDetailsService exposed as a bean, the following test will be invoked with an Authentication of type UsernamePasswordAuthenticationToken and a principal that is returned from the UserDetailsService with the username of "user".

We can also customize the username used to lookup the user from our UserDetailsService. For example, this test would be executed with a principal that is returned from the UserDetailsService with the username of "customUsername".

We can also provide an explicit bean name to look up the UserDetailsService. For example, this test would look up the username of "customUsername" using the UserDetailsService with the bean name "myUserDetailsService".

Like @WithMockUser we can also place our annotation at the class level so that every test uses the same user. However unlike @WithMockUser, @WithUserDetails requires the user to exist.

By default the SecurityContext is set during the TestExecutionListener.beforeTestMethod event. This is the equivalent of happening before JUnit’s @Before. You can change this to happen during the TestExecutionListener.beforeTestExecution event which is after JUnit’s @Before but before the test method is invoked.

We have seen that @WithMockUser is an excellent choice if we are not using a custom Authentication principal. Next we discovered that @WithUserDetails would allow us to use a custom UserDetailsService to create our Authentication principal but required the user to exist. We will now see an option that allows the most flexibility.

We can create our own annotation that uses the @WithSecurityContext to create any SecurityContext we want. For example, we might create an annotation named @WithMockCustomUser as shown below:

You can see that @WithMockCustomUser is annotated with the @WithSecurityContext annotation. This is what signals to Spring Security Test support that we intend to create a SecurityContext for the test. The @WithSecurityContext annotation requires we specify a SecurityContextFactory that will create a new SecurityContext given our @WithMockCustomUser annotation. You can find our WithMockCustomUserSecurityContextFactory implementation below:

We can now annotate a test class or a test method with our new annotation and Spring Security’s WithSecurityContextTestExecutionListener will ensure that our SecurityContext is populated appropriately.

When creating your own WithSecurityContextFactory implementations, it is nice to know that they can be annotated with standard Spring annotations. For example, the WithUserDetailsSecurityContextFactory uses the @Autowired annotation to acquire the UserDetailsService:

By default the SecurityContext is set during the TestExecutionListener.beforeTestMethod event. This is the equivalent of happening before JUnit’s @Before. You can change this to happen during the TestExecutionListener.beforeTestExecution event which is after JUnit’s @Before but before the test method is invoked.

If you reuse the same user within your tests often, it is not ideal to have to repeatedly specify the attributes. For example, if there are many tests related to an administrative user with the username "admin" and the roles ROLE_USER and ROLE_ADMIN you would have to write:

Rather than repeating this everywhere, we can use a meta annotation. For example, we could create a meta annotation named WithMockAdmin:

Now we can use @WithMockAdmin in the same way as the more verbose @WithMockUser.

Meta annotations work with any of the testing annotations described above. For example, this means we could create a meta annotation for @WithUserDetails("admin") as well.

In order to use Spring Security with Spring MVC Test it is necessary to add the Spring Security FilterChainProxy as a Filter. It is also necessary to add Spring Security’s TestSecurityContextHolderPostProcessor to support Running as a User in Spring MVC Test with Annotations. This can be done using Spring Security’s SecurityMockMvcConfigurers.springSecurity(). For example:

Spring MVC Test provides a convenient interface called a RequestPostProcessor that can be used to modify a request. Spring Security provides a number of RequestPostProcessor implementations that make testing easier. In order to use Spring Security’s RequestPostProcessor implementations ensure the following static import is used:

Spring MVC Test also provides a RequestBuilder interface that can be used to create the MockHttpServletRequest used in your test. Spring Security provides a few RequestBuilder implementations that can be used to make testing easier. In order to use Spring Security’s RequestBuilder implementations ensure the following static import is used:

At times it is desirable to make various security related assertions about a request. To accommodate this need, Spring Security Test support implements Spring MVC Test’s ResultMatcher interface. In order to use Spring Security’s ResultMatcher implementations ensure the following static import is used:

When using servlet filters, you obviously need to declare them in your web.xml, or they will be ignored by the servlet container. In Spring Security, the filter classes are also Spring beans defined in the application context and thus able to take advantage of Spring’s rich dependency-injection facilities and lifecycle interfaces. Spring’s DelegatingFilterProxy provides the link between web.xml and the application context.

When using DelegatingFilterProxy, you will see something like this in the web.xml file:

Notice that the filter is actually a DelegatingFilterProxy, and not the class that will actually implement the logic of the filter. What DelegatingFilterProxy does is delegate the Filter 's methods through to a bean which is obtained from the Spring application context. This enables the bean to benefit from the Spring web application context lifecycle support and configuration flexibility. The bean must implement javax.servlet.Filter and it must have the same name as that in the filter-name element. Read the Javadoc for DelegatingFilterProxy for more information

Spring Security’s web infrastructure should only be used by delegating to an instance of FilterChainProxy. The security filters should not be used by themselves. In theory you could declare each Spring Security filter bean that you require in your application context file and add a corresponding DelegatingFilterProxy entry to web.xml for each filter, making sure that they are ordered correctly, but this would be cumbersome and would clutter up the web.xml file quickly if you have a lot of filters. FilterChainProxy lets us add a single entry to web.xml and deal entirely with the application context file for managing our web security beans. It is wired using a DelegatingFilterProxy, just like in the example above, but with the filter-name set to the bean name "filterChainProxy". The filter chain is then declared in the application context with the same bean name. Here’s an example:

The namespace element filter-chain is used for convenience to set up the security filter chain(s) which are required within the application. ^[6]. It maps a particular URL pattern to a list of filters built up from the bean names specified in the filters element, and combines them in a bean of type SecurityFilterChain. The pattern attribute takes an Ant Paths and the most specific URIs should appear first ^[7]. At runtime the FilterChainProxy will locate the first URI pattern that matches the current web request and the list of filter beans specified by the filters attribute will be applied to that request. The filters will be invoked in the order they are defined, so you have complete control over the filter chain which is applied to a particular URL.

You may have noticed we have declared two SecurityContextPersistenceFilter s in the filter chain (ASC is short for allowSessionCreation, a property of SecurityContextPersistenceFilter). As web services will never present a jsessionid on future requests, creating HttpSession s for such user agents would be wasteful. If you had a high-volume application which required maximum scalability, we recommend you use the approach shown above. For smaller applications, using a single SecurityContextPersistenceFilter (with its default allowSessionCreation as true) would likely be sufficient.

Note that FilterChainProxy does not invoke standard filter lifecycle methods on the filters it is configured with. We recommend you use Spring’s application context lifecycle interfaces as an alternative, just as you would for any other Spring bean.

When we looked at how to set up web security using namespace configuration, we used a DelegatingFilterProxy with the name "springSecurityFilterChain". You should now be able to see that this is the name of the FilterChainProxy which is created by the namespace.

The order that filters are defined in the chain is very important. Irrespective of which filters you are actually using, the order should be as follows:

Spring Security has several areas where patterns you have defined are tested against incoming requests in order to decide how the request should be handled. This occurs when the FilterChainProxy decides which filter chain a request should be passed through and also when the FilterSecurityInterceptor decides which security constraints apply to a request. It’s important to understand what the mechanism is and what URL value is used when testing against the patterns that you define.

The Servlet Specification defines several properties for the HttpServletRequest which are accessible via getter methods, and which we might want to match against. These are the contextPath, servletPath, pathInfo and queryString. Spring Security is only interested in securing paths within the application, so the contextPath is ignored. Unfortunately, the servlet spec does not define exactly what the values of servletPath and pathInfo will contain for a particular request URI. For example, each path segment of a URL may contain parameters, as defined in RFC 2396 ^[8]. The Specification does not clearly state whether these should be included in the servletPath and pathInfo values and the behaviour varies between different servlet containers. There is a danger that when an application is deployed in a container which does not strip path parameters from these values, an attacker could add them to the requested URL in order to cause a pattern match to succeed or fail unexpectedly. ^[9]. Other variations in the incoming URL are also possible. For example, it could contain path-traversal sequences (like /../) or multiple forward slashes (//) which could also cause pattern-matches to fail. Some containers normalize these out before performing the servlet mapping, but others don’t. To protect against issues like these, FilterChainProxy uses an HttpFirewall strategy to check and wrap the request. Un-normalized requests are automatically rejected by default, and path parameters and duplicate slashes are removed for matching purposes. ^[10]. It is therefore essential that a FilterChainProxy is used to manage the security filter chain. Note that the servletPath and pathInfo values are decoded by the container, so your application should not have any valid paths which contain semi-colons, as these parts will be removed for matching purposes.

As mentioned above, the default strategy is to use Ant-style paths for matching and this is likely to be the best choice for most users. The strategy is implemented in the class AntPathRequestMatcher which uses Spring’s AntPathMatcher to perform a case-insensitive match of the pattern against the concatenated servletPath and pathInfo, ignoring the queryString.

If for some reason, you need a more powerful matching strategy, you can use regular expressions. The strategy implementation is then RegexRequestMatcher. See the Javadoc for this class for more information.

In practice we recommend that you use method security at your service layer, to control access to your application, and do not rely entirely on the use of security constraints defined at the web-application level. URLs change and it is difficult to take account of all the possible URLs that an application might support and how requests might be manipulated. You should try and restrict yourself to using a few simple ant paths which are simple to understand. Always try to use a "deny-by-default" approach where you have a catch-all wildcard ( / or ) defined last and denying access.

Security defined at the service layer is much more robust and harder to bypass, so you should always take advantage of Spring Security’s method security options.

The HttpFirewall also prevents HTTP Response Splitting by rejecting new line characters in the HTTP Response headers.

By default the StrictHttpFirewall is used. This implementation rejects requests that appear to be malicious. If it is too strict for your needs, then you can customize what types of requests are rejected. However, it is important that you do so knowing that this can open your application up to attacks. For example, if you wish to leverage Spring MVC’s Matrix Variables, the following configuration could be used in XML:

The same thing can be achieved with Java Configuration by exposing a StrictHttpFirewall bean.

The StrictHttpFirewall provides a whitelist of valid HTTP methods that are allowed to protect against Cross Site Tracing (XST) and HTTP Verb Tampering. The default valid methods are "DELETE", "GET", "HEAD", "OPTIONS", "PATCH", "POST", and "PUT". If your application needs to modify the valid methods, you can configure a custom StrictHttpFirewall bean. For example, the following will only allow HTTP "GET" and "POST" methods:

The same thing can be achieved with Java Configuration by exposing a StrictHttpFirewall bean.

If you must allow any HTTP method (not recommended), you can use StrictHttpFirewall.setUnsafeAllowAnyHttpMethod(true). This will disable validation of the HTTP method entirely.

If you’re using some other framework that is also filter-based, then you need to make sure that the Spring Security filters come first. This enables the SecurityContextHolder to be populated in time for use by the other filters. Examples are the use of SiteMesh to decorate your web pages or a web framework like Wicket which uses a filter to handle its requests.

As we saw earlier in the namespace chapter, it’s possible to use multiple http elements to define different security configurations for different URL patterns. Each element creates a filter chain within the internal FilterChainProxy and the URL pattern that should be mapped to it. The elements will be added in the order they are declared, so the most specific patterns must again be declared first. Here’s another example, for a similar situation to that above, where the application supports both a stateless RESTful API and also a normal web application which users log into using a form.

We’ve already seen FilterSecurityInterceptor briefly when discussing access-control in general, and we’ve already used it with the namespace where the <intercept-url> elements are combined to configure it internally. Now we’ll see how to explicitly configure it for use with a FilterChainProxy, along with its companion filter ExceptionTranslationFilter. A typical configuration example is shown below:

FilterSecurityInterceptor is responsible for handling the security of HTTP resources. It requires a reference to an AuthenticationManager and an AccessDecisionManager. It is also supplied with configuration attributes that apply to different HTTP URL requests. Refer back to the original discussion on these in the technical introduction.

The FilterSecurityInterceptor can be configured with configuration attributes in two ways. The first, which is shown above, is using the <filter-security-metadata-source> namespace element. This is similar to the <http> element from the namespace chapter but the <intercept-url> child elements only use the pattern and access attributes. Commas are used to delimit the different configuration attributes that apply to each HTTP URL. The second option is to write your own SecurityMetadataSource, but this is beyond the scope of this document. Irrespective of the approach used, the SecurityMetadataSource is responsible for returning a List<ConfigAttribute> containing all of the configuration attributes associated with a single secure HTTP URL.

It should be noted that the FilterSecurityInterceptor.setSecurityMetadataSource() method actually expects an instance of FilterInvocationSecurityMetadataSource. This is a marker interface which subclasses SecurityMetadataSource. It simply denotes the SecurityMetadataSource understands FilterInvocation s. In the interests of simplicity we’ll continue to refer to the FilterInvocationSecurityMetadataSource as a SecurityMetadataSource, as the distinction is of little relevance to most users.

The SecurityMetadataSource created by the namespace syntax obtains the configuration attributes for a particular FilterInvocation by matching the request URL against the configured pattern attributes. This behaves in the same way as it does for namespace configuration. The default is to treat all expressions as Apache Ant paths and regular expressions are also supported for more complex cases. The request-matcher attribute is used to specify the type of pattern being used. It is not possible to mix expression syntaxes within the same definition. As an example, the previous configuration using regular expressions instead of Ant paths would be written as follows:

Patterns are always evaluated in the order they are defined. Thus it is important that more specific patterns are defined higher in the list than less specific patterns. This is reflected in our example above, where the more specific /secure/super/ pattern appears higher than the less specific /secure/ pattern. If they were reversed, the /secure/ pattern would always match and the /secure/super/ pattern would never be evaluated.

The ExceptionTranslationFilter sits above the FilterSecurityInterceptor in the security filter stack. It doesn’t do any actual security enforcement itself, but handles exceptions thrown by the security interceptors and provides suitable and HTTP responses.

We covered the purpose of this all-important filter in the Technical Overview chapter so you might want to re-read that section at this point. Let’s first take a look at how you would configure it for use with a FilterChainProxy. A basic configuration only requires the bean itself

As we saw previously, this filter has two main tasks. It is responsible for storage of the SecurityContext contents between HTTP requests and for clearing the SecurityContextHolder when a request is completed. Clearing the ThreadLocal in which the context is stored is essential, as it might otherwise be possible for a thread to be replaced into the servlet container’s thread pool, with the security context for a particular user still attached. This thread might then be used at a later stage, performing operations with the wrong credentials.

We’ve now seen the three main filters which are always present in a Spring Security web configuration. These are also the three which are automatically created by the namespace <http> element and cannot be substituted with alternatives. The only thing that’s missing now is an actual authentication mechanism, something that will allow a user to authenticate. This filter is the most commonly used authentication filter and the one that is most often customized ^[13]. It also provides the implementation used by the <form-login> element from the namespace. There are three stages required to configure it.

The login form simply contains username and password input fields, and posts to the URL that is monitored by the filter (by default this is /login). The basic filter configuration looks something like this:

The following section describes the Servlet 3 methods that Spring Security integrates with.

The following section describes the Servlet 3.1 methods that Spring Security integrates with.

BasicAuthenticationFilter is responsible for processing basic authentication credentials presented in HTTP headers. This can be used for authenticating calls made by Spring remoting protocols (such as Hessian and Burlap), as well as normal browser user agents (such as Firefox and Internet Explorer). The standard governing HTTP Basic Authentication is defined by RFC 1945, Section 11, and BasicAuthenticationFilter conforms with this RFC. Basic Authentication is an attractive approach to authentication, because it is very widely deployed in user agents and implementation is extremely simple (it’s just a Base64 encoding of the username:password, specified in an HTTP header).

DigestAuthenticationFilter is capable of processing digest authentication credentials presented in HTTP headers. Digest Authentication attempts to solve many of the weaknesses of Basic authentication, specifically by ensuring credentials are never sent in clear text across the wire. Many user agents support Digest Authentication, including Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer. The standard governing HTTP Digest Authentication is defined by RFC 2617, which updates an earlier version of the Digest Authentication standard prescribed by RFC 2069. Most user agents implement RFC 2617. Spring Security’s DigestAuthenticationFilter is compatible with the “auth” quality of protection (qop) prescribed by RFC 2617, which also provides backward compatibility with RFC 2069. Digest Authentication is a more attractive option if you need to use unencrypted HTTP (i.e. no TLS/HTTPS) and wish to maximise security of the authentication process. Indeed Digest Authentication is a mandatory requirement for the WebDAV protocol, as noted by RFC 2518 Section 17.1.

Central to Digest Authentication is a "nonce". This is a value the server generates. Spring Security’s nonce adopts the following format:

The DigestAuthenticatonEntryPoint has a property specifying the key used for generating the nonce tokens, along with a nonceValiditySeconds property for determining the expiration time (default 300, which equals five minutes). Whist ever the nonce is valid, the digest is computed by concatenating various strings including the username, password, nonce, URI being requested, a client-generated nonce (merely a random value which the user agent generates each request), the realm name etc, then performing an MD5 hash. Both the server and user agent perform this digest computation, resulting in different hash codes if they disagree on an included value (eg password). In Spring Security implementation, if the server-generated nonce has merely expired (but the digest was otherwise valid), the DigestAuthenticationEntryPoint will send a "stale=true" header. This tells the user agent there is no need to disturb the user (as the password and username etc is correct), but simply to try again using a new nonce.

An appropriate value for the nonceValiditySeconds parameter of DigestAuthenticationEntryPoint depends on your application. Extremely secure applications should note that an intercepted authentication header can be used to impersonate the principal until the expirationTime contained in the nonce is reached. This is the key principle when selecting an appropriate setting, but it would be unusual for immensely secure applications to not be running over TLS/HTTPS in the first instance.

Because of the more complex implementation of Digest Authentication, there are often user agent issues. For example, Internet Explorer fails to present an “opaque” token on subsequent requests in the same session. Spring Security filters therefore encapsulate all state information into the “nonce” token instead. In our testing, Spring Security’s implementation works reliably with Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer, correctly handling nonce timeouts etc.

Remember-me or persistent-login authentication refers to web sites being able to remember the identity of a principal between sessions. This is typically accomplished by sending a cookie to the browser, with the cookie being detected during future sessions and causing automated login to take place. Spring Security provides the necessary hooks for these operations to take place, and has two concrete remember-me implementations. One uses hashing to preserve the security of cookie-based tokens and the other uses a database or other persistent storage mechanism to store the generated tokens.

Note that both implementations require a UserDetailsService. If you are using an authentication provider which doesn’t use a UserDetailsService (for example, the LDAP provider) then it won’t work unless you also have a UserDetailsService bean in your application context.

This approach uses hashing to achieve a useful remember-me strategy. In essence a cookie is sent to the browser upon successful interactive authentication, with the cookie being composed as follows:

As such the remember-me token is valid only for the period specified, and provided that the username, password and key does not change. Notably, this has a potential security issue in that a captured remember-me token will be usable from any user agent until such time as the token expires. This is the same issue as with digest authentication. If a principal is aware a token has been captured, they can easily change their password and immediately invalidate all remember-me tokens on issue. If more significant security is needed you should use the approach described in the next section. Alternatively remember-me services should simply not be used at all.

If you are familiar with the topics discussed in the chapter on namespace configuration, you can enable remember-me authentication just by adding the <remember-me> element:

The UserDetailsService will normally be selected automatically. If you have more than one in your application context, you need to specify which one should be used with the user-service-ref attribute, where the value is the name of your UserDetailsService bean.

This approach is based on the article http://jaspan.com/improved_persistent_login_cookie_best_practice with some minor modifications ^[16]. To use the this approach with namespace configuration, you would supply a datasource reference:

The database should contain a persistent_logins table, created using the following SQL (or equivalent):

Remember-me is used with UsernamePasswordAuthenticationFilter, and is implemented via hooks in the AbstractAuthenticationProcessingFilter superclass. It is also used within BasicAuthenticationFilter. The hooks will invoke a concrete RememberMeServices at the appropriate times. The interface looks like this:

Please refer to the Javadoc for a fuller discussion on what the methods do, although note at this stage that AbstractAuthenticationProcessingFilter only calls the loginFail() and loginSuccess() methods. The autoLogin() method is called by RememberMeAuthenticationFilter whenever the SecurityContextHolder does not contain an Authentication. This interface therefore provides the underlying remember-me implementation with sufficient notification of authentication-related events, and delegates to the implementation whenever a candidate web request might contain a cookie and wish to be remembered. This design allows any number of remember-me implementation strategies. We’ve seen above that Spring Security provides two implementations. We’ll look at these in turn.

Before we discuss how Spring Security can protect applications from CSRF attacks, we will explain what a CSRF attack is. Let’s take a look at a concrete example to get a better understanding.

Assume that your bank’s website provides a form that allows transferring money from the currently logged in user to another bank account. For example, the HTTP request might look like:

Now pretend you authenticate to your bank’s website and then, without logging out, visit an evil website. The evil website contains an HTML page with the following form:

You like to win money, so you click on the submit button. In the process, you have unintentionally transferred $100 to a malicious user. This happens because, while the evil website cannot see your cookies, the cookies associated with your bank are still sent along with the request.

Worst yet, this whole process could have been automated using JavaScript. This means you didn’t even need to click on the button. So how do we protect ourselves from such attacks?

The issue is that the HTTP request from the bank’s website and the request from the evil website are exactly the same. This means there is no way to reject requests coming from the evil website and allow requests coming from the bank’s website. To protect against CSRF attacks we need to ensure there is something in the request that the evil site is unable to provide.

One solution is to use the Synchronizer Token Pattern. This solution is to ensure that each request requires, in addition to our session cookie, a randomly generated token as an HTTP parameter. When a request is submitted, the server must look up the expected value for the parameter and compare it against the actual value in the request. If the values do not match, the request should fail.

We can relax the expectations to only require the token for each HTTP request that updates state. This can be safely done since the same origin policy ensures the evil site cannot read the response. Additionally, we do not want to include the random token in HTTP GET as this can cause the tokens to be leaked.

Let’s take a look at how our example would change. Assume the randomly generated token is present in an HTTP parameter named _csrf. For example, the request to transfer money would look like this:

You will notice that we added the _csrf parameter with a random value. Now the evil website will not be able to guess the correct value for the _csrf parameter (which must be explicitly provided on the evil website) and the transfer will fail when the server compares the actual token to the expected token.

When should you use CSRF protection? Our recommendation is to use CSRF protection for any request that could be processed by a browser by normal users. If you are only creating a service that is used by non-browser clients, you will likely want to disable CSRF protection.

So what are the steps necessary to use Spring Security’s to protect our site against CSRF attacks? The steps to using Spring Security’s CSRF protection are outlined below:

There are a few caveats when implementing CSRF.

Spring Security’s goal is to provide defaults that protect your users from exploits. This does not mean that you are forced to accept all of its defaults.

For example, you can provide a custom CsrfTokenRepository to override the way in which the CsrfToken is stored.

You can also specify a custom RequestMatcher to determine which requests are protected by CSRF (i.e. perhaps you don’t care if log out is exploited). In short, if Spring Security’s CSRF protection doesn’t behave exactly as you want it, you are able to customize the behavior. Refer to the <csrf> documentation for details on how to make these customizations with XML and the CsrfConfigurer javadoc for details on how to make these customizations when using Java configuration.

Spring Security allows users to easily inject the default security headers to assist in protecting their application. The default for Spring Security is to include the following headers:

For additional details on each of these headers, refer to the corresponding sections:

While each of these headers are considered best practice, it should be noted that not all clients utilize the headers, so additional testing is encouraged.

You can customize specific headers. For example, assume that want your HTTP response headers to look like the following:

Specifically, you want all of the default headers with the following customizations:

You can easily do this with the following Java Configuration:

Alternatively, if you are using Spring Security XML Configuration, you can use the following:

If you do not want the defaults to be added and want explicit control over what should be used, you can disable the defaults. An example for both Java and XML based configuration is provided below:

If you are using Spring Security’s Java Configuration the following will only add Cache Control.

The following XML will only add Cache Control.

If necessary, you can disable all of the HTTP Security response headers with the following Java Configuration:

If necessary, you can disable all of the HTTP Security response headers with the following XML configuration below:

Spring Security has mechanisms to make it convenient to add the more common security headers to your application. However, it also provides hooks to enable adding custom headers.

The SessionManagementFilter checks the contents of the SecurityContextRepository against the current contents of the SecurityContextHolder to determine whether a user has been authenticated during the current request, typically by a non-interactive authentication mechanism, such as pre-authentication or remember-me ^[17]. If the repository contains a security context, the filter does nothing. If it doesn’t, and the thread-local SecurityContext contains a (non-anonymous) Authentication object, the filter assumes they have been authenticated by a previous filter in the stack. It will then invoke the configured SessionAuthenticationStrategy.

If the user is not currently authenticated, the filter will check whether an invalid session ID has been requested (because of a timeout, for example) and will invoke the configured InvalidSessionStrategy, if one is set. The most common behaviour is just to redirect to a fixed URL and this is encapsulated in the standard implementation SimpleRedirectInvalidSessionStrategy. The latter is also used when configuring an invalid session URL through the namespace,as described earlier.

SessionAuthenticationStrategy is used by both SessionManagementFilter and AbstractAuthenticationProcessingFilter, so if you are using a customized form-login class, for example, you will need to inject it into both of these. In this case, a typical configuration, combining the namespace and custom beans might look like this:

Note that the use of the default, SessionFixationProtectionStrategy may cause issues if you are storing beans in the session which implement HttpSessionBindingListener, including Spring session-scoped beans. See the Javadoc for this class for more information.

Spring Security is able to prevent a principal from concurrently authenticating to the same application more than a specified number of times. Many ISVs take advantage of this to enforce licensing, whilst network administrators like this feature because it helps prevent people from sharing login names. You can, for example, stop user "Batman" from logging onto the web application from two different sessions. You can either expire their previous login or you can report an error when they try to log in again, preventing the second login. Note that if you are using the second approach, a user who has not explicitly logged out (but who has just closed their browser, for example) will not be able to log in again until their original session expires.

Concurrency control is supported by the namespace, so please check the earlier namespace chapter for the simplest configuration. Sometimes you need to customize things though.

The implementation uses a specialized version of SessionAuthenticationStrategy, called ConcurrentSessionControlAuthenticationStrategy.

To use concurrent session support, you’ll need to add the following to web.xml:

In addition, you will need to add the ConcurrentSessionFilter to your FilterChainProxy. The ConcurrentSessionFilter requires two constructor arguments, sessionRegistry, which generally points to an instance of SessionRegistryImpl, and sessionInformationExpiredStrategy, which defines the strategy to apply when a session has expired. A configuration using the namespace to create the FilterChainProxy and other default beans might look like this:

Adding the listener to web.xml causes an ApplicationEvent to be published to the Spring ApplicationContext every time a HttpSession commences or terminates. This is critical, as it allows the SessionRegistryImpl to be notified when a session ends. Without it, a user will never be able to log back in again once they have exceeded their session allowance, even if they log out of another session or it times out.

It’s generally considered good security practice to adopt a "deny-by-default" where you explicitly specify what is allowed and disallow everything else. Defining what is accessible to unauthenticated users is a similar situation, particularly for web applications. Many sites require that users must be authenticated for anything other than a few URLs (for example the home and login pages). In this case it is easiest to define access configuration attributes for these specific URLs rather than have for every secured resource. Put differently, sometimes it is nice to say ROLE_SOMETHING is required by default and only allow certain exceptions to this rule, such as for login, logout and home pages of an application. You could also omit these pages from the filter chain entirely, thus bypassing the access control checks, but this may be undesirable for other reasons, particularly if the pages behave differently for authenticated users.

This is what we mean by anonymous authentication. Note that there is no real conceptual difference between a user who is "anonymously authenticated" and an unauthenticated user. Spring Security’s anonymous authentication just gives you a more convenient way to configure your access-control attributes. Calls to servlet API calls such as getCallerPrincipal, for example, will still return null even though there is actually an anonymous authentication object in the SecurityContextHolder.

There are other situations where anonymous authentication is useful, such as when an auditing interceptor queries the SecurityContextHolder to identify which principal was responsible for a given operation. Classes can be authored more robustly if they know the SecurityContextHolder always contains an Authentication object, and never null.

Anonymous authentication support is provided automatically when using the HTTP configuration Spring Security 3.0 and can be customized (or disabled) using the <anonymous> element. You don’t need to configure the beans described here unless you are using traditional bean configuration.

Three classes that together provide the anonymous authentication feature. AnonymousAuthenticationToken is an implementation of Authentication, and stores the GrantedAuthority s which apply to the anonymous principal. There is a corresponding AnonymousAuthenticationProvider, which is chained into the ProviderManager so that AnonymousAuthenticationToken s are accepted. Finally, there is an AnonymousAuthenticationFilter, which is chained after the normal authentication mechanisms and automatically adds an AnonymousAuthenticationToken to the SecurityContextHolder if there is no existing Authentication held there. The definition of the filter and authentication provider appears as follows:

The key is shared between the filter and authentication provider, so that tokens created by the former are accepted by the latter ^[18]. The userAttribute is expressed in the form of usernameInTheAuthenticationToken,grantedAuthority[,grantedAuthority]. This is the same syntax as used after the equals sign for the userMap property of InMemoryDaoImpl.

As explained earlier, the benefit of anonymous authentication is that all URI patterns can have security applied to them. For example:

Rounding out the anonymous authentication discussion is the AuthenticationTrustResolver interface, with its corresponding AuthenticationTrustResolverImpl implementation. This interface provides an isAnonymous(Authentication) method, which allows interested classes to take into account this special type of authentication status. The ExceptionTranslationFilter uses this interface in processing AccessDeniedException s. If an AccessDeniedException is thrown, and the authentication is of an anonymous type, instead of throwing a 403 (forbidden) response, the filter will instead commence the AuthenticationEntryPoint so the principal can authenticate properly. This is a necessary distinction, otherwise principals would always be deemed "authenticated" and never be given an opportunity to login via form, basic, digest or some other normal authentication mechanism.

You will often see the ROLE_ANONYMOUS attribute in the above interceptor configuration replaced with IS_AUTHENTICATED_ANONYMOUSLY, which is effectively the same thing when defining access controls. This is an example of the use of the AuthenticatedVoter which we will see in the authorization chapter. It uses an AuthenticationTrustResolver to process this particular configuration attribute and grant access to anonymous users. The AuthenticatedVoter approach is more powerful, since it allows you to differentiate between anonymous, remember-me and fully-authenticated users. If you don’t need this functionality though, then you can stick with ROLE_ANONYMOUS, which will be processed by Spring Security’s standard RoleVoter.

Spring Security 4.0 has introduced authorization support for WebSockets through the Spring Messaging abstraction. To configure authorization using Java Configuration, simply extend the AbstractSecurityWebSocketMessageBrokerConfigurer and configure the MessageSecurityMetadataSourceRegistry. For example:

This will ensure that:

Spring Security also provides XML Namespace support for securing WebSockets. A comparable XML based configuration looks like the following:

This will ensure that:

WebSockets reuse the same authentication information that is found in the HTTP request when the WebSocket connection was made. This means that the Principal on the HttpServletRequest will be handed off to WebSockets. If you are using Spring Security, the Principal on the HttpServletRequest is overridden automatically.

More concretely, to ensure a user has authenticated to your WebSocket application, all that is necessary is to ensure that you setup Spring Security to authenticate your HTTP based web application.

Spring Security 4.0 has introduced authorization support for WebSockets through the Spring Messaging abstraction. To configure authorization using Java Configuration, simply extend the AbstractSecurityWebSocketMessageBrokerConfigurer and configure the MessageSecurityMetadataSourceRegistry. For example:

This will ensure that:

Spring Security also provides XML Namespace support for securing WebSockets. A comparable XML based configuration looks like the following:

This will ensure that: