Difficulties with basic Spring Security Configuration - spring

Question

I'm trying to build a very basic, straight-forward authentication for a spring project.
The problem I'm having is that the application constantly sends me to the "login-failed" page, although I've declared 2 basic accounts (admin and user).
my application-Security.xml:
<http auto-config="true" use-expressions="true">
<form-login login-processing-url="/resources/j_spring_security_check" login-page="/login" authentication-failure-url="/login/denied" />
<logout logout-url="/resources/j_spring_security_logout" />
<!-- Configure these elements to secure URIs in your application -->
<intercept-url pattern="/choices/**" access="hasRole('ROLE_ADMIN')" />
<intercept-url pattern="/member/**" access="isAuthenticated()" />
<intercept-url pattern="/resources/**" access="permitAll" />
<intercept-url pattern="/login" access="permitAll" />
<intercept-url pattern="/home/**" access="hasRole('ROLE_ADMIN')" />
<intercept-url pattern="/*Details/*" access="hasRole('ROLE_USER')" />
</http>
<!-- Configure Authentication mechanism -->
<authentication-manager alias="authenticationManager">
<!-- SHA-256 values can be produced using 'echo -n your_desired_password | sha256sum' (using normal *nix environments) -->
<authentication-provider>
<password-encoder hash="sha-256" />
<user-service>
<user name="admin" password="admin" authorities="ROLE_ADMIN" />
<user name="user" password="user" authorities="ROLE_USER" />
</user-service>
</authentication-provider>
</authentication-manager>
my VERY basic login-form:
<form action="/${app_name}/resources/j_spring_security_check" method="POST">
<label for="j_username">Username</label>
<input id="j_username" name="j_username" type="text" /><br/>
<label for="j_password">Password</label>
<input id="j_password" name="j_password" type="password" /><br/>
<input type="submit" value="Login" />
</form>
For now the controller is there only to resolve the URLs for login, login/denied etc.
I'm just starting out with Spring and Roo, so this might just be something obvious that I'm overlooking.
Thanks to anyone taking the time to answer.

Answer 1

Your problem is that you have defined a password-encoder
<password-encoder hash="sha-256" />
while your password is plain text
<user name="admin" password="admin" authorities="ROLE_ADMIN" />
Either remove the encoder or (better) specify the password, encoded with the algorithm you have chosen (sha-256)