I'm very new in Spring and never really used java for making web. And I'm making a web with a separated frontend and backend services and I'm trying to make an authentication system using Spring Boot Security. How can I do it? Do I put the security on both the service or just one of them? What's the best way to implement it?
The question is subjective and can have too many interpretations based on context. My understanding is that putting security on both front-end and backend is the best way to implement. After a successful backend authentication you should issue a unique cookie to the browser as it allows users to continue using a site without having to log in to every single page. For each subsequent call, the website recognizes the user from cookie data.
You can use this link for a better understanding of dual authentication mechanism.
Related
I’ve got a question which seems popular, but I couldn’t find the answer. Well there’s a lot of information about it but I’m not sure what the best way is. So here’s the scenario.
We have a Single Page Application (SPA) and a RESTful Web Service (API). We use an external authentication/authorization service provider via OAuth2/JWT. But I need to persist the user ID (provided by the external authentication provider) on the database on the server side after successful login. And also I need to enrich the Authentication/Principal object in security context after successful login (for example by adding email).
There's a lot on the web about this scenario. But we have SDK for authentication/authorization already and it works perfectly (no custom code, etc). I just need to add something to the authentication object. What is the correct way to do it? Thanks.
For the record, this is what we did:
As I said there's already a SDK doing all the heavy lifting of authentication mechanics. We just need to enrich the authentication object after successful authentication. So we wrapped the AuthenticationProvider (implemented in the SDK) in our implementation (inspired by PreAuthenticatedAuthenticationProvider) and after successful authentication, we enriched the result using our UserDetails implementation (inspired by PreAuthenticatedGrantedAuthoritiesUserDetailsService). The rest was straight forward.
PS: please let me know if you don't like the idea.
The current application I'm working on makes use of oauth2 quite extensively.
For each screen, the user may be required to authenticate via an external service (while still maintaining authentication for the other screens they have already visited).
So for example:
ScreenA -> Authenticate via ServiceX
ScreenB -> Authenticate via ServiceY
ScreenC -> Authenticate via ServiceZ
It is possible for users to be authenticated to multiple login providers at the same time in a given session.
As such, I've decided to handle the oauth2 workflow manually instead of relying on Spring Boot's OAuth2 library. It does seem like this library provides multiple login providers but it looks far too complicated for such a simple scenario and I'm not sure if it's even possible to have users authenticated to multiple providers at once.
Anyway, that was the background information. My plan for the implementation is to just store the access token in the session object for each of the screens. So this means that I have a separate bean in the session object for each of the screens, and I'm going to make it thread safe to account for the web session pitfalls.
Is there an easier way of doing what I'm trying to achieve? I can't find any best practices on this approach.
If my manual approach is the best way, then how do I take advantage of the other functionalities provided by Spring Security? Namely, I would like to use #PreAuthorize (perhaps define a role for each of login providers) and maybe even get WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter to work with these roles.
Ultimately, I'm having difficulty coming up with the right architecture for this situation.
With what you have provided, it's possible to implement OAuth2 authentication.
Use one Authentication Server ( this will be a wrapper service that can authenticate against service X, Y and Z)
Any time you go to any screen, you pass down which service to authenticate against (in request header or in some way), so that Authentication Server can authenticate and return you proper token.
All of the spring security features will still be useable in this scenario.
I have a Webapp that consists of a REST API, and then another app that represents a frontend of this API. Both of this apps are developed using Spring.
Currently my REST api is not secured and data can be accessed directly by calling the REST endpoint without additional security info.
My frontend does have a login form (I'm using Spring Security for that), but does not have access to a database (the only access is through the REST endpoint). So the login process is done through an extension of the AuthenticationProvider that calls the REST api with the user and password and then responds with the authentication result. No authentication/authorization is kept on the REST side since to my knowledge this protocol should be stateless.
The problem is I need to incorporate ACL into my app, so that a user can only see those resources he's authorized to see (i.e. those he created). But given that my authentication process takes place on the frontend layer (which is where I keep a session attribute with the user info), I have two main problems:
How can I secure my REST channel?
How can I know which user is making the request on every communication, without explicitly passing the userdetails in each API request? is this even possible?
Doing it stateless and making two separate web application usually is overkill.
What I usually end up doing is.
Make my RestAPI stateful, because usually scaling is not an issue and simple form authentication will suffice.
Combine a Rest API/HTML Client in one Webapplication. If you want to keep it modular, you could create a Rest API module and integrate it as a JAR file in the lib folder of your web app.
Here is also some thread which goes through different alternatives for a rest API.
How to do authentication with a REST API right? (Browser + Native clients)
In a previous post, I had asked the SO community what may be the best way of securing my Servlets so that a user could not simply rip out my url from src and use it as a free api of sorts:
How to keep Servlets to my site only (some sort of authentication)?
I was directed to look at OAuth 1.0 as it is stable and well supported.
Thinking more on it, what if I used JSP in place of OAuth and jquery ajax?
I could still put all main hard coded files on my Varnish servers and just the ones that need dynamic content would be JSP files that called Servlets for their data, thus not exposing any Servlet address.
Question(s): Would this JSP model be acceptable in a production environment? Or is best case scenario to stay with jquery ajax and oauth? Is the difference in speed considerable between these two different scenarios?
In the previous question. I don't know that OAuth is strictly the answer (though it could possibly be used). OAuth is really more geared towards allowing usage of your services via third-party authentication and authorization. In your case, I don't know who that third party would be.
What it does sound like you might want is the concept of an authentication token. So before a client can call your services, they would need to call one of your services to get an authentication token. All requests against you servlets would then need to also pass this authentication token and have the token validated as being active prior to you issuing a response.
You mentioned that your servlets are stateless (which is certainly appropriate for many API's), but I am wondering if the client application as a whole has state such that it could acquire such a token via some event (client application login for example) and be able to store the token for sending with each request against the servlets, as well as be able to handle refreshed tokens as tokens near their expiry.
I am starting a new project where we are planing to build a restful back end and an AJAX font end. I am approaching the problem by focusing on Identifying all the resources that I have and what the various HTTP verbs will do them, their URI and the JSON representations of those resources.
I am looking for the best design for securing the backend. Here is the list of designs I have considered. I am looking for alternative designs not listed below, and pros, cons recommendations. The system will be implemented with Spring 3.0 and possibly Spring Security 3.0, SSL will be used for many parts of the system but not for all of them, so some requests may come on SSL and some might not.
Option 1: Use the HTTP session
Show a standard login screen, create a server side session and let tomcat send back a jsessionid cookie and have the ajax client include the JSESSIONID cookie on every XHR request. This options just feels like it's the wrong approach for the following reasons.
The connection becomes statefull which is against the rules of REST
I want to be able to split the bakcend into multiple seperate WAR files which means i could have multiple HTTP sessions on the backend, if that is the case then this approach does not work. While I don't need the ability to split the backend into multiple apps today, I would prefer a design that allows for that possibility.
Option 2: Find an open source Java based security library that does this
Other than Spring security I have not found any other Java libraries, any recommendations are highly appreciated.
Option 3: Try to use an existing protocol like OAuth
In my very brief look at OAuth it seems that it is designed for authentication across sites where each site has it's own user database. In this system i want a global user database shared across all the backend ajax services.
Option 4: Use SAML and Shiboleth
This options seems over kill and hugely complex to setup and maintain.
Option 5: Send the username and password with every request
This requires that user sends their username and password with every request, which means that the front end AJAX app must store the username and password as a JavaScript object and if the user navigates away from the page then back the username/password combo will be gone and the user might be forced to log in again. I don't want the front end to try and put the username and password into cookie as that would comprise security.
Option 6: Implement my own authentication / Authorization protocol
Create a REST service that users can present their username/password combination to and then get back and security token, which they must send back to the service with every request. The security token would be digitally signed by the service and would have an expiry time. The token would be only good for most operations high security operations would require a new login screen as port of confirming the operation.
Problem with this approach is I have to invent yet another security protocol which seems like a total waste of time.
I am sure I am not the only person up against this problem, I hope the stack overflow community can point to some options and tools that I have not found yet.
Take a look at Apache Shiro. It is an authentication system that has a session management feature that can be used to share sessions across applications. This may be the easiest thing to do.
Or you could use Spring Security (or Shiro) with a Remember Me cookie that is shared across the webapps (as long as they are in the same HTTP domain). The remember me cookie would be analogous to your token in option 6. You can set the expiration on the cookie that so it is short lived like a session cookie or long lived like a regular remember me.
You might also want to take a look at Jasig CAS - Single Sign-On for the Web. It has a REST API and a protocol (Proxy Tickets) that allows services to proxy user AuthN to backend services like you described in option 6. http://www.jasig.org/cas
Briefly...the application that serves up the AJAX client is protected with Spring Security (supports CAS out of the box) and gets a Proxy Granting Ticket that you embed in the AJAX client. The AJAX client uses the PGT to get Proxy Tickets for your REST services...protected with Spring Security too. The REST services get an authenticated userId without every touching primary credentials.
Alternative, you could keep the PGT on the server and use AJAX calls to retrieve Proxy Tickets that are then used by the AJAX client to call you REST services.
As I understood you are going to secure a rest application, to preface you must know that a security provider consisd of three concepts (3A):
-Authentication
-Authorization
-Auditing
to implement these three together you must provide bunch of tools such as :
-SSO provider
-Session Store
-Open Id pattern
-user credentials integration
....
I have used ACL(Spring ACL) to provide authorization services and oauth2 for authentication.
there is one channel to connect these two together and its scopes(oauth2 scopes) but the problem is scopes are not flexible(pure strings) enough to implement authorization modules such as role_voter, cache_strategy, black_list or,Role_base strategy, exceptional permissions, white_list... (but you can use #EnableGlobalMethodSecurity)
In my case I used authorization server as a resource for oauth2 authentication server(take a look at http://projects.spring.io/spring-security-oauth/docs/oauth2.html), then I considered two spots to check authorization, the first I issued ACL to front-end and forced programmer to design her page dynamically up to ACL concept, the second is in back-end on service layer(BLL) using Aspect when one rest is going to be called. I sent the service key as an actee to check if current user has enough access control to do that. and for auditing you must monitor all requests I mean you must use an listener in your gateway or broker...