This class will check the current contents of the security context and, if empty, it will attempt to extract user information from the HTTP request and submit it to the AuthenticationManager. Subclasses override the following methods to obtain this information:

protected abstract Object getPreAuthenticatedPrincipal(HttpServletRequest request);

protected abstract Object getPreAuthenticatedCredentials(HttpServletRequest request);

After calling these, the filter will create a PreAuthenticatedAuthenticationToken containing the returned data and submit it for authentication. By "authentication" here, we really just mean further processing to perhaps load the user’s authorities, but the standard Spring Security authentication architecture is followed.

Like other Spring Security authentication filters, the pre-authentication filter has an authenticationDetailsSource property which by default will create a WebAuthenticationDetails object to store additional information such as the session-identifier and originating IP address in the details property of the Authentication object. In cases where user role information can be obtained from the pre-authentication mechanism, the data is also stored in this property, with the details implementing the GrantedAuthoritiesContainer interface. This enables the authentication provider to read the authorities which were externally allocated to the user. We’ll look at a concrete example next.

The pre-authenticated provider has little more to do than load the UserDetails object for the user. It does this by delegating to an AuthenticationUserDetailsService. The latter is similar to the standard UserDetailsService but takes an Authentication object rather than just user name:

public interface AuthenticationUserDetailsService {
    UserDetails loadUserDetails(Authentication token) throws UsernameNotFoundException;
}

This interface may have also other uses but with pre-authentication it allows access to the authorities which were packaged in the Authentication object, as we saw in the previous section. The PreAuthenticatedGrantedAuthoritiesUserDetailsService class does this. Alternatively, it may delegate to a standard UserDetailsService via the UserDetailsByNameServiceWrapper implementation.

The AuthenticationEntryPoint was discussed in the technical overview chapter. Normally it is responsible for kick-starting the authentication process for an unauthenticated user (when they try to access a protected resource), but in the pre-authenticated case this doesn’t apply. You would only configure the ExceptionTranslationFilter with an instance of this class if you aren’t using pre-authentication in combination with other authentication mechanisms. It will be called if the user is rejected by the AbstractPreAuthenticatedProcessingFilter resulting in a null authentication. It always returns a 403-forbidden response code if called.

An external authentication system may supply information to the application by setting specific headers on the HTTP request. A well-known example of this is Siteminder, which passes the username in a header called SM_USER. This mechanism is supported by the class RequestHeaderAuthenticationFilter which simply extracts the username from the header. It defaults to using the name SM_USER as the header name. See the Javadoc for more details.

	Tip
	Note that when using a system like this, the framework performs no authentication checks at all and it is extremely important that the external system is configured properly and protects all access to the application. If an attacker is able to forge the headers in their original request without this being detected then they could potentially choose any username they wished.

<security:http>
<!-- Additional http configuration omitted -->
<security:custom-filter position="PRE_AUTH_FILTER" ref="siteminderFilter" />
</security:http>

<bean id="siteminderFilter" class="org.springframework.security.web.authentication.preauth.RequestHeaderAuthenticationFilter">
<property name="principalRequestHeader" value="SM_USER"/>
<property name="authenticationManager" ref="authenticationManager" />
</bean>

<bean id="preauthAuthProvider" class="org.springframework.security.web.authentication.preauth.PreAuthenticatedAuthenticationProvider">
<property name="preAuthenticatedUserDetailsService">
    <bean id="userDetailsServiceWrapper"
        class="org.springframework.security.core.userdetails.UserDetailsByNameServiceWrapper">
    <property name="userDetailsService" ref="userDetailsService"/>
    </bean>
</property>
</bean>

<security:authentication-manager alias="authenticationManager">
<security:authentication-provider ref="preauthAuthProvider" />
</security:authentication-manager>

The class J2eePreAuthenticatedProcessingFilter will extract the username from the userPrincipal property of the HttpServletRequest. Use of this filter would usually be combined with the use of Java EE roles as described above in the section called “J2eeBasedPreAuthenticatedWebAuthenticationDetailsSource”.

There is a sample application in the codebase which uses this approach, so get hold of the code from github and have a look at the application context file if you are interested. The code is in the samples/xml/preauth directory.

The <ldap-server> element can also be used to create an embedded server, which can be very useful for testing and demonstrations. In this case you use it without the url attribute:

<ldap-server root="dc=springframework,dc=org"/>

Here we’ve specified that the root DIT of the directory should be "dc=springframework,dc=org", which is the default. Used this way, the namespace parser will create an embedded Apache Directory server and scan the classpath for any LDIF files, which it will attempt to load into the server. You can customize this behaviour using the ldif attribute, which defines an LDIF resource to be loaded:

<ldap-server ldif="classpath:users.ldif" />

This makes it a lot easier to get up and running with LDAP, since it can be inconvenient to work all the time with an external server. It also insulates the user from the complex bean configuration needed to wire up an Apache Directory server. Using plain Spring Beans the configuration would be much more cluttered. You must have the necessary Apache Directory dependency jars available for your application to use. These can be obtained from the LDAP sample application.

This is the most common LDAP authentication scenario.

<ldap-authentication-provider user-dn-pattern="uid={0},ou=people"/>

This simple example would obtain the DN for the user by substituting the user login name in the supplied pattern and attempting to bind as that user with the login password. This is OK if all your users are stored under a single node in the directory. If instead you wished to configure an LDAP search filter to locate the user, you could use the following:

<ldap-authentication-provider user-search-filter="(uid={0})"
    user-search-base="ou=people"/>

If used with the server definition above, this would perform a search under the DN ou=people,dc=springframework,dc=org using the value of the user-search-filter attribute as a filter. Again the user login name is substituted for the parameter in the filter name, so it will search for an entry with the uid attribute equal to the user name. If user-search-base isn’t supplied, the search will be performed from the root.

How authorities are loaded from groups in the LDAP directory is controlled by the following attributes.

So if we used the following configuration

<ldap-authentication-provider user-dn-pattern="uid={0},ou=people"
        group-search-base="ou=groups" />

and authenticated successfully as user "ben", the subsequent loading of authorities would perform a search under the directory entry ou=groups,dc=springframework,dc=org, looking for entries which contain the attribute uniqueMember with value uid=ben,ou=people,dc=springframework,dc=org. By default the authority names will have the prefix ROLE_ prepended. You can change this using the role-prefix attribute. If you don’t want any prefix, use role-prefix="none". For more information on loading authorities, see the Javadoc for the DefaultLdapAuthoritiesPopulator class.

The authenticator is also responsible for retrieving any required user attributes. This is because the permissions on the attributes may depend on the type of authentication being used. For example, if binding as the user, it may be necessary to read them with the user’s own permissions.

There are currently two authentication strategies supplied with Spring Security:

The beans discussed above have to be able to connect to the server. They both have to be supplied with a SpringSecurityContextSource which is an extension of Spring LDAP’s ContextSource. Unless you have special requirements, you will usually configure a DefaultSpringSecurityContextSource bean, which can be configured with the URL of your LDAP server and optionally with the username and password of a "manager" user which will be used by default when binding to the server (instead of binding anonymously). For more information read the Javadoc for this class and for Spring LDAP’s AbstractContextSource.

Often a more complicated strategy than simple DN-matching is required to locate a user entry in the directory. This can be encapsulated in an LdapUserSearch instance which can be supplied to the authenticator implementations, for example, to allow them to locate a user. The supplied implementation is FilterBasedLdapUserSearch.

After authenticating the user successfully, the LdapAuthenticationProvider will attempt to load a set of authorities for the user by calling the configured LdapAuthoritiesPopulator bean. The DefaultLdapAuthoritiesPopulator is an implementation which will load the authorities by searching the directory for groups of which the user is a member (typically these will be groupOfNames or groupOfUniqueNames entries in the directory). Consult the Javadoc for this class for more details on how it works.

If you want to use LDAP only for authentication, but load the authorities from a difference source (such as a database) then you can provide your own implementation of this interface and inject that instead.

A typical configuration, using some of the beans we’ve discussed here, might look like this:

<bean id="contextSource"
        class="org.springframework.security.ldap.DefaultSpringSecurityContextSource">
<constructor-arg value="ldap://monkeymachine:389/dc=springframework,dc=org"/>
<property name="userDn" value="cn=manager,dc=springframework,dc=org"/>
<property name="password" value="password"/>
</bean>

<bean id="ldapAuthProvider"
    class="org.springframework.security.ldap.authentication.LdapAuthenticationProvider">
<constructor-arg>
<bean class="org.springframework.security.ldap.authentication.BindAuthenticator">
    <constructor-arg ref="contextSource"/>
    <property name="userDnPatterns">
    <list><value>uid={0},ou=people</value></list>
    </property>
</bean>
</constructor-arg>
<constructor-arg>
<bean
    class="org.springframework.security.ldap.userdetails.DefaultLdapAuthoritiesPopulator">
    <constructor-arg ref="contextSource"/>
    <constructor-arg value="ou=groups"/>
    <property name="groupRoleAttribute" value="ou"/>
</bean>
</constructor-arg>
</bean>

This would set up the provider to access an LDAP server with URL ldap://monkeymachine:389/dc=springframework,dc=org. Authentication will be performed by attempting to bind with the DN uid=<user-login-name>,ou=people,dc=springframework,dc=org. After successful authentication, roles will be assigned to the user by searching under the DN ou=groups,dc=springframework,dc=org with the default filter (member=<user’s-DN>). The role name will be taken from the "ou" attribute of each match.

To configure a user search object, which uses the filter (uid=<user-login-name>) for use instead of the DN-pattern (or in addition to it), you would configure the following bean

<bean id="userSearch"
    class="org.springframework.security.ldap.search.FilterBasedLdapUserSearch">
<constructor-arg index="0" value=""/>
<constructor-arg index="1" value="(uid={0})"/>
<constructor-arg index="2" ref="contextSource" />
</bean>

and use it by setting the BindAuthenticator bean’s userSearch property. The authenticator would then call the search object to obtain the correct user’s DN before attempting to bind as this user.

The net result of an authentication using LdapAuthenticationProvider is the same as a normal Spring Security authentication using the standard UserDetailsService interface. A UserDetails object is created and stored in the returned Authentication object. As with using a UserDetailsService, a common requirement is to be able to customize this implementation and add extra properties. When using LDAP, these will normally be attributes from the user entry. The creation of the UserDetails object is controlled by the provider’s UserDetailsContextMapper strategy, which is responsible for mapping user objects to and from LDAP context data:

public interface UserDetailsContextMapper {

UserDetails mapUserFromContext(DirContextOperations ctx, String username,
        Collection<GrantedAuthority> authorities);

void mapUserToContext(UserDetails user, DirContextAdapter ctx);
}

Only the first method is relevant for authentication. If you provide an implementation of this interface and inject it into the LdapAuthenticationProvider, you have control over exactly how the UserDetails object is created. The first parameter is an instance of Spring LDAP’s DirContextOperations which gives you access to the LDAP attributes which were loaded during authentication. The username parameter is the name used to authenticate and the final parameter is the collection of authorities loaded for the user by the configured LdapAuthoritiesPopulator.

The way the context data is loaded varies slightly depending on the type of authentication you are using. With the BindAuthenticator, the context returned from the bind operation will be used to read the attributes, otherwise the data will be read using the standard context obtained from the configured ContextSource (when a search is configured to locate the user, this will be the data returned by the search object).

Configuring ActiveDirectoryLdapAuthenticationProvider is quite straightforward. You just need to supply the domain name and an LDAP URL supplying the address of the server ^[20]. An example configuration would then look like this:

<bean id="adAuthenticationProvider"
class="org.springframework.security.ldap.authentication.ad.ActiveDirectoryLdapAuthenticationProvider">
    <constructor-arg value="mydomain.com" />
    <constructor-arg value="ldap://adserver.mydomain.com/" />
</bean>
}

Note that there is no need to specify a separate ContextSource in order to define the server location - the bean is completely self-contained. A user named "Sharon", for example, would then be able to authenticate by entering either the username sharon or the full Active Directory userPrincipalName, namely [email protected]. The user’s directory entry will then be located, and the attributes returned for possible use in customizing the created UserDetails object (a UserDetailsContextMapper can be injected for this purpose, as described above). All interaction with the directory takes place with the identity of the user themselves. There is no concept of a "manager" user.

By default, the user authorities are obtained from the memberOf attribute values of the user entry. The authorities allocated to the user can again be customized using a UserDetailsContextMapper. You can also inject a GrantedAuthoritiesMapper into the provider instance to control the authorities which end up in the Authentication object.

After the user successfully authenticates with the OAuth 2.0 Provider, the OAuth2User.getAuthorities() (or OidcUser.getAuthorities()) may be mapped to a new set of GrantedAuthority instances, which will be supplied to OAuth2AuthenticationToken when completing the authentication.

	Tip
	OAuth2AuthenticationToken.getAuthorities() is used for authorizing requests, such as in hasRole('USER') or hasRole('ADMIN').

There are a couple of options to choose from when mapping user authorities:

@EnableWebSecurity
public class OAuth2LoginSecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {

    @Override
    protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
        http
            .oauth2Login()
                .userInfoEndpoint()
                    .userAuthoritiesMapper(this.userAuthoritiesMapper())
                    ...
    }

    private GrantedAuthoritiesMapper userAuthoritiesMapper() {
        return (authorities) -> {
            Set<GrantedAuthority> mappedAuthorities = new HashSet<>();

            authorities.forEach(authority -> {
                if (OidcUserAuthority.class.isInstance(authority)) {
                    OidcUserAuthority oidcUserAuthority = (OidcUserAuthority)authority;

                    OidcIdToken idToken = oidcUserAuthority.getIdToken();
                    OidcUserInfo userInfo = oidcUserAuthority.getUserInfo();

                    // Map the claims found in idToken and/or userInfo
                    // to one or more GrantedAuthority's and add it to mappedAuthorities

                } else if (OAuth2UserAuthority.class.isInstance(authority)) {
                    OAuth2UserAuthority oauth2UserAuthority = (OAuth2UserAuthority)authority;

                    Map<String, Object> userAttributes = oauth2UserAuthority.getAttributes();

                    // Map the attributes found in userAttributes
                    // to one or more GrantedAuthority's and add it to mappedAuthorities

                }
            });

            return mappedAuthorities;
        };
    }
}

@EnableWebSecurity
public class OAuth2LoginSecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {

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

    @Bean
    public GrantedAuthoritiesMapper userAuthoritiesMapper() {
        ...
    }
}

@EnableWebSecurity
public class OAuth2LoginSecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {

    @Override
    protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
        http
            .oauth2Login()
                .userInfoEndpoint()
                    .oidcUserService(this.oidcUserService())
                    ...
    }

    private OAuth2UserService<OidcUserRequest, OidcUser> oidcUserService() {
        final OidcUserService delegate = new OidcUserService();

        return (userRequest) -> {
            // Delegate to the default implementation for loading a user
            OidcUser oidcUser = delegate.loadUser(userRequest);

            OAuth2AccessToken accessToken = userRequest.getAccessToken();
            Set<GrantedAuthority> mappedAuthorities = new HashSet<>();

            // TODO
            // 1) Fetch the authority information from the protected resource using accessToken
            // 2) Map the authority information to one or more GrantedAuthority's and add it to mappedAuthorities

            // 3) Create a copy of oidcUser but use the mappedAuthorities instead
            oidcUser = new DefaultOidcUser(mappedAuthorities, oidcUser.getIdToken(), oidcUser.getUserInfo());

            return oidcUser;
        };
    }
}

CustomUserTypesOAuth2UserService is an implementation of an OAuth2UserService that provides support for custom OAuth2User types.

If the default implementation (DefaultOAuth2User) does not suit your needs, you can define your own implementation of OAuth2User.

The following code demonstrates how you would register a custom OAuth2User type for GitHub:

@EnableWebSecurity
public class OAuth2LoginSecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {

    @Override
    protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
        http
            .oauth2Login()
                .userInfoEndpoint()
                    .customUserType(GitHubOAuth2User.class, "github")
                    ...
    }
}

The following code shows an example of a custom OAuth2User type for GitHub:

public class GitHubOAuth2User implements OAuth2User {
    private List<GrantedAuthority> authorities =
        AuthorityUtils.createAuthorityList("ROLE_USER");
    private Map<String, Object> attributes;
    private String id;
    private String name;
    private String login;
    private String email;

    @Override
    public Collection<? extends GrantedAuthority> getAuthorities() {
        return this.authorities;
    }

    @Override
    public Map<String, Object> getAttributes() {
        if (this.attributes == null) {
            this.attributes = new HashMap<>();
            this.attributes.put("id", this.getId());
            this.attributes.put("name", this.getName());
            this.attributes.put("login", this.getLogin());
            this.attributes.put("email", this.getEmail());
        }
        return attributes;
    }

    public String getId() {
        return this.id;
    }

    public void setId(String id) {
        this.id = id;
    }

    @Override
    public String getName() {
        return this.name;
    }

    public void setName(String name) {
        this.name = name;
    }

    public String getLogin() {
        return this.login;
    }

    public void setLogin(String login) {
        this.login = login;
    }

    public String getEmail() {
        return this.email;
    }

    public void setEmail(String email) {
        this.email = email;
    }
}

	Tip
	id, name, login, and email are attributes returned in GitHub’s UserInfo Response. For detailed information returned from the UserInfo Endpoint, see the API documentation for "Get the authenticated user".

DefaultOAuth2UserService is an implementation of an OAuth2UserService that supports standard OAuth 2.0 Provider’s.

	Note
	OAuth2UserService obtains the user attributes of the end-user (the resource owner) from the UserInfo Endpoint (by using the access token granted to the client during the authorization flow) and returns an AuthenticatedPrincipal in the form of an OAuth2User.

DefaultOAuth2UserService uses a RestOperations when requesting the user attributes at the UserInfo Endpoint.

If you need to customize the pre-processing of the UserInfo Request, you can provide DefaultOAuth2UserService.setRequestEntityConverter() with a custom Converter<OAuth2UserRequest, RequestEntity<?>>. The default implementation OAuth2UserRequestEntityConverter builds a RequestEntity representation of a UserInfo Request that sets the OAuth2AccessToken in the Authorization header by default.

On the other end, if you need to customize the post-handling of the UserInfo Response, you will need to provide DefaultOAuth2UserService.setRestOperations() with a custom configured RestOperations. The default RestOperations is configured as follows:

RestTemplate restTemplate = new RestTemplate();
restTemplate.setErrorHandler(new OAuth2ErrorResponseErrorHandler());

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 DefaultOAuth2UserService or provide your own implementation of OAuth2UserService, you’ll need to configure it as shown in the following example:

@EnableWebSecurity
public class OAuth2LoginSecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {

    @Override
    protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
        http
            .oauth2Login()
                .userInfoEndpoint()
                    .userService(this.oauth2UserService())
                    ...
    }

    private OAuth2UserService<OAuth2UserRequest, OAuth2User> oauth2UserService() {
        ...
    }
}

OidcUserService is an implementation of an OAuth2UserService that supports OpenID Connect 1.0 Provider’s.

The OidcUserService leverages the DefaultOAuth2UserService when requesting the user attributes at the UserInfo Endpoint.

If you need to customize the pre-processing of the UserInfo Request and/or the post-handling of the UserInfo Response, you will need to provide OidcUserService.setOauth2UserService() with a custom configured DefaultOAuth2UserService.

Whether you customize OidcUserService or provide your own implementation of OAuth2UserService for OpenID Connect 1.0 Provider’s, you’ll need to configure it as shown in the following example:

@EnableWebSecurity
public class OAuth2LoginSecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {

    @Override
    protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
        http
            .oauth2Login()
                .userInfoEndpoint()
                    .oidcUserService(this.oidcUserService())
                    ...
    }

    private OAuth2UserService<OidcUserRequest, OidcUser> oidcUserService() {
        ...
    }
}