How to set custom 'User-Agent` header in oauth access_token request - spring

I'm developing a spring boot application and am trying to integrate with Reddit oauth using Spring Security. It all works great up until the request to Reddit for the access token.
Reddit has a set of rules that rate limits requests from User-Agent including Java. The default User-Agent sent by java application is Java/<version>. I tried overriding this by setting the http.agent system property, but Java/<version> is still appended to the end (as shown here) which triggers the rate-limiting.
Is there some other simple way I can override the User-Agent header that's included in the access token request to the oauth server?

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Additional parameter in oauth2 token request

I'm developing backend for oauth2 client. I'm using authorization_grant flow with PKCE extension. I'm trying to implement it in such way that code verifier and code challenge is generated on clients side. So i have to add additional parameters to my token request (the second request, when input is authorization code and my application exchange it for access token).
My app will have to take this code_verifier from request param and pass it to authorization server with authorization code, client id, and client secret.
So now I'm struggling with customizing spring-security-oauth2-client to add additional parameter. There is way to add such parameters to authorization request by implementing OAuth2AuthorizationRequestResolver, but is there analogical way for adding parameters to token request?
Or maybe should i implement this endpoint manually?
I feel your pain, since Spring OAuth Security is often poorly documented for common use cases. One option you might consider is to provide a custom Spring filter that uses the open source nimbusds libraries, which have very good documentation and are easy to use.

How to validate SM_USER header in Spring Security preauthentication for siteminder

I 'm trying to create a secure spring rest api using pre-authentication security for siteminder.
I 've tried a solution where I 'm getting SM_USER and when I tested it in postman by adding new header SM_USER with random value it seems to work fine.
If you don't provide header I'm getting an error org.springframework.security.web.authentication.preauth.PreAuthenticatedCredentialsNotFoundException: SM_USER header not found in request which is valid.
But how can I be sure that this is secure? if someone knows the URL of my rest api could call this without problem. Should I check something else in spring or only siteminder offers user authentication?
The front-end SiteMinder web agent is the guaranty that the session is valid - you must make sure via server/network configuration that your application cannot be accessed directly without first passing through the SiteMinder web agent.
Also, SiteMinder asserts multiple headers. SM_USER should not be used alone because it can be asserted by the web agent in some circumstances when the user does not actually have a valid session. Instead, you should first look for the existence (non-blank) of SM_SERVERSESSIONID, which only exists if the session is valid.
Lastly, I generally try to avoid SM_USER at all - because SM_USER is actually not a user attribute at all, but rather is "the login identifier used for authentication". If SiteMinder authenticates users via federation (e.g. SAML) or x509 authentication, SM_USER will be rather different than if a login form was used. Instead, its better in SiteMinder to set a "universal id" that is a user attribute, and appears in the headers as SM_UNIVERSALID. Your SiteMinder administrators will know how to do this (and may already have - look to see if you have a SM_UNIVERSALID header available already).
One other caution, in some SiteMinder configurations, the underscore will not be in the header name (use of the underscore is called "legacy" header mode in SiteMinder), so you might want to make your app configurable with respect to the header names, e.g. SMSERVERSESSIONID, SMUSER, SMUNIVERSALID etc.
If you want to programmatically re-validate a session, you can use the SiteMinder Agent API or REST API, or look at my company's product "SSO/Rest" which provides a comprehensive set of uniform REST interfaces to SiteMinder and also other SSO providers (http://www.idfconnect.com).
HTH!
-Richard

Authenticate MVC clients with Web API Tokens

Currently I have created a WebAPI Project using identity framework and I have setup tokens to be returned when authenticating with the API.
So now I am looking at creating a standalone MVC application that will allow the user to make calls to the WebAPI to get back end data.
The goal is to separate functionality so that other applications can also start interacting with back end data through web calls.
So the confusion now is how do I setup my MVC project so that I can use the Authorize attributes on controllers with the token received from the WebAPI. I think I need to enable bearer tokens in the ConfigureAuth method in Startup.Auth.cs. However will that be sufficient enough? Or do I also need to enable the cookie authentication?
MVC and Web Api are fundamentally different when it comes to authentication. With Web Api, the bearer token has to be set in the header of the request, but this is not an issue as all API requests are done programmatically by the client, i.e. there's human-intervention involved in setting up the client to authenticate the request properly.
MVC is a different beast in that the actions are accessed generally via a web browser, which will not automatically affix a bearer token to the request header. What it will do is pass cookies set by the server back to the server. That's why cookie auth is used most typically for MVC web applications.
What you should do is enable cookie auth for the MVC site and then set up your sign in action to authenticate via the Web Api. When you get back a valid auth from the Web Api, then you can manually sign in the user via the Identity API:
await SignInManager.SignInAsync(user);

Recommended way to secure ASP.NET 5 Web API application

In previous versions of ASP.NET you got authorization and authentication out of the box from the default template.
I have a Web API application and three or four well defined clients that will consume it and I need to secure it.
I read about OpenID and OAuth but they seem like an overkill for my problem.
What's the simplest way to achieve that?
These would be the 3 best solutions if you require security:
WEB API browser client: Implicit OAuth 2 flow
WEB API Application client: OAuth2 code flow
(With OpenId)
OR: Cookie Authentication with Cross-site request forgery protection. (Default template MVC 6 website template)
If your application is public, I would use at least one of these, otherwise it depends on how secure your data must be.
Well, it depends on your scenario. If you don't need authentication (because it's a server-to-server scenario), use a security token as described below. If you need authentication of the user, you may use Basic or Digest security combined with HTTPS.
In a security token scenario, the client simply has to add the token to the request headers and the server needs to validate the token. Make sure the requests transit as HTTPS to make sure the token is encrypted. Remember, this method is only valid if you know the applications that will access your API will be in a secure environment (another server, for example). Otherwise, I would go for another solution.

Spring Security - REST API - token vs. cookie

I have written a REST- API in Java and I have secured this API with Spring Security. The procedure is like this:
Frontend invokes /login RestService in Backend
Backend gives back token to frontend
at each REST- API Backend invokation the token has to be placed in header
This works fine, but I have read that it is also possible (with Node.JS/Passport.js/Express.js) that the session object with the cookie inside can be transfered out of the box without any custom code.
My question now would be if there is a better approach so that the frontend/client do not need to set the token into the header all the time for any request.
Usually token based authentication has advantages over cookie based.
You can achieve this using middle-ware layer
Here is a good Post - https://auth0.com/blog/2014/01/07/angularjs-authentication-with-cookies-vs-token/
Server side, I usually first check in the headers if there is an auth token. If not, I then check in the cookies as a fallback.
If you want to use cookies, then at your step 2, you need to add a Set-Cookie header to the response, so that browsers know they must store a cookie. Once done, no need to add a header client-side, since browsers will send cookies each request. You'll need to add a CSRF protection though (here is a good example).

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