With Spring Security how do i determine if the current api request should be authenticated or not? - spring-boot

Question

With spring security you can have public api endpoints that are accessible by everyone and endpoints that need to be authenticated before getting a response. In my app users authenticate via a jwt token. For logged in users right now the token is always checked, regardless of whether a public api endpoint gets the request or not.
I would like to know how to check if the current endpoint is a public endpoint or a authenticated one, that way i can alter the code so that the token checking is only done when the endpoint requires authentication.
I could add all public endpoints in a hashset and compare the current request endpoint with the public ones but that isn't efficient and also, some of the public endpoints contain wildcards (**) so that would make comparing a bit of a hassle.
This is the only information i could find:
Spring Security - check if web url is secure / protected
but its about JSP.
I can't get the request information from SecurityContextHolder.getContext() either. My guess is that i should get the information from org.springframework.security.config.annotation.web.builders.HttpSecurity because that is the same class used to define which endpoints don't require authentication. (with anthMatchers().permitall()). But i don't know which method to invoke and i'm not sure if HttpSecurity can even be autowired into another class. Can anyone give me some pointers?
Thank you

Answer 1

Assuming that you're using a separate filter for the token check, you can avoid the token check for public endpoints by overriding the protected boolean shouldNotFilter(HttpServletRequest request) method of the OncePerRequestFilter in your JwtTokenFilter. By default, this method will always return false. So all requests will get filtered. Overriding this method to return true for the public endpoints will give you the desired functionality.
And to check the requests with the wildcards(**), you can use AntPathRequestMatcher. So, you can do something like below.
public class JwtTokenFilter extends OncePerRequestFilter {
private static RequestMatcher requestMatcher;
public static void ignorePatterns(String... antPatterns) {
List<RequestMatcher> matchers = new ArrayList<>();
for (String pattern : antPatterns) {
matchers.add(new AntPathRequestMatcher(pattern, null));
}
requestMatcher = new OrRequestMatcher(matchers);
}
static {
final String[] publicEndPoints = {"/public-api/**","/resources/**"};
ignorePatterns(publicEndPoints);
}
#Override
protected boolean shouldNotFilter(HttpServletRequest request) throws ServletException {
return requestMatcher.matches(request);
}
#Override
protected void doFilterInternal(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response, FilterChain chain)
throws ServletException, IOException {
....
}
}
Hope this helps!!