I have a requirement where I need to use role based access to service methods. I have restful services and i use spring-data to interact with MongoDB.
There are some of the restrictions that I have. I deal with a document in DB called "Organization". In each organization, I know who are the Admins. I do not have a repository of users who can access the services.
So the only way I can enforce some access based rules is to check if the logged in user is one of the admin's configured for each organization and then allow the user to access the methods.
Should I think of applying Spring security in this case? Otherwise will a simple check on user against the configured admins in the database document help? Can I make this check at a single point so that I can apply it to service methods based on my use case needs.
Please provide your suggestions / thoughts on how to go about this.
If you use Spring Security your rest methods can take advantage of a passed-in authenticated Principal object (example here) whereupon you can do whatever extra validation desired (such as checking if the admin is good for the given organization requested, etc.) There are many other parameters also available, perhaps allowing for this org checking to be done once and stored in the session object.
I have been looking at BreezeJS and I want to try it but I searched a lot and still cannot understand how security is handled while using Breeze. Here is what I know:
According to a post on IdeaBlade forums (creators of BreezeJS), we only need a single Api Controller for all of our entities. The Api controller will contain one MetaData method, one Get method for each entity, one Save method, one Delete method. So this way we only need one EntityManager on client side configured with one service endpoint.
My questions:
My understanding of "single controller for all entities" is correct?
If my understanding is correct then how can we apply security on our controller? If I want a user with certain role to access only certain entities, I obviously cannot put an Authorize filter on my controller or method. May be I want a certain user to have read-only access while other users having read-write access on a certain entity. May be I only want to return aggregated data to user while restricting access to full details.
Please help. Thanks.
I'm developing a fairly standard web application with Wicket, Spring & Hibernate. I've been using wicket-auth-roles and spring-security to authenticate users, and now want to add more fine grained authorizations to my applications.
In my applications users are members of groups, and groups have access to a subset of Hibernate objects that I use as wicket IModel objects. As such the decision whether or not a user may view certain page does not depend on the page path, but on the page model. (Most implementations of authorization for Wicket I've seen either grant access to a url or restrict it; they do not perform any checks on the model object.)
At present I've implemented this restriction as a custom IAuthorizationStrategy like this:
#Override
public boolean isActionAuthorized(final Component component, final Action action) {
if (!(component instanceof GenePage))
// We only check access to the GenePage for now
return true;
// Figure out from component what Gene the user is trying to view
Gene gene = (Gene) component.getDefaultModelObject();
User user = MySession.get().getUserModel().getObject();
return geneDAO.hasAccess(user, gene);
}
The problem with this implementation is that it fully composes the page and only in Page#onConfigure throws an uncaught UnauthorizedActionException. So far I've been unable to catch this exception, so it's logged as a problem even though it's part of the normal program flow. Fully composing the page also triggers a few actions in my page constructor and Page#onInitialize that I would only like to run if the user may actually view the Page.
Can anyone recommend me a better approach to restrict page access based on whether users have access to the Model object?
Solutions that tie in anywhere along the stack using Hibernate, Spring, Spring Security, Wicket and/or Wicket-Auth-Roles would be preferred. I know there are other wicket auth-integrations out there, so if you feel those could help in this instance, please let me know!
I feel that you expect a weird behaviour. This authz mechanism is designed to protect against Insecure Direct Object Reference Vulnerabilities. So you should not use it as a "part of the normal program flow". If you have kind of valid use cases then such kind of "hasAccess" failures should be handled somehow differently as valid behaviour, you should use some other mechanism, probably something custom built, as in most cases it will be very specific to your application.
I'm using Spring Security which works great to make sure that a user has a certain role before accessing a resource. But now I need to verify something a little different:
`/product/edit/{productId}`
What is the best way to verify that the logged in user "owns" productId? My business mappings handle the relationship (a user has a list of products). I need to verify this product belongs to the user and hence, they can edit it.
I know how to gain access to productId and the logged in user in both the controller and an interceptor. I don't believe this logic belongs in the controller at all. The interceptor seems better but I wondered if Spring Security had an "accepted" way of handling this situation.
Yes, in Spring you can implement this by implementing Access Control Lists. ACL declaration specifies permissions for individual objects per user. Once you have everything setup like acl entries in your database and logic, you can use SpEL and #PostFilter annotation to control the list of objects returned to a user.
Spring Security Documentation
Related:
I'm writing a web application with some ACL requirements: a user can make changes to some items, some items may be editable by several users, administrator can edit anything and a manager can edit everything within her organization etc.
I'm using the Play! framework, and by the looks of the Secure module, it seems that the place to put authorization concerns is in the Controllers. However, it seems to me that the authorization issues are part of the business logic, and therefore should be in the model. Furthermore, I'm starting to see duplicated logic in the controllers that I need to refactor out.
On the other hand, adding authorization to the model means that I'd have to have some way of getting the current user from within the model, which doesn't seem right. Alternatively, I could add a "current_user" parameter to every model method, but that seems even worse.
So what is the common practice? Can/should I put authorization code in the model, or keep it in the controller?
I think this is a grey area. One could argue that the user access is part of the mapping between the HTTP world and the Object-Oriented world. This is what the controller is intended for (hence the heavy use of statics), to transform the incoming request, ready to process the business rules on the domain model.
I would suggest that the controller logic is absolutely the right place for controlling the access to the model, especially as this is managed largely at an annotation level, and the authentication is abstracted off to a Security class.
Authorization should neither be part of controller or domain model.
Instead it should be in the service layer.
Controller should just act as dispatcher and delegate between HTTP and application service.
It's the application service where the orchestration takes place. This is the best place for placing authorization.
Suppose user A is authorized to access data from domain X, but not authorized for even a read access for data from domain Y. If authorization is placed in the controller, then user A gets authorized in the controller X, and via the service calls can access data from domain Y, which is not what we expected.
Since domain models communicate with each other on service layer, hence it best to place the authorization on the same level.
In most cases, the security should be one (or more) layer above the Model. Security is a domain on it's own, restricting access to a lower level layer.
I don't think the security should be done at the controller level.
In my opinion, this should look like that:
View -> Controller -> Security -> Model
The security layer could be a façade or a proxy over the model, protecting access, but be transparent to the controller.
However, if the views are to be modified depending on the access rights of the user, some checks might have to happen at the controller level (like setting the value of a CanEdit boolean property on the ViewModel).
I personally really like the way the Play! Secure module handles this (the tutorial is ever-helpful here). If you don't mind using the #Before annotation, it's pretty painless.
I am at this stage and intending to handle this in the following way:
No form validation by JS, instead via HTTPS ajax
An Ajax php class
Form data sent to a model as its data for concrete validation for
common type such as email and password (likely assoc array validation will be reused by other classes so this is definately a model area).
if no error a lookup in a User table for the credentials email /
password credentials passed to a Controller with the authentication
type such as login / signup / password reset
the controller then produces the required output view or sets user logged in session etc
This is based in Laravel but I have my own library as want it independent of laravel and just loosely based for this vital requirement.
The point being that the Model looks up the required credentials as data, then sends to the Controller as it does not care how it should be processed. I think this is the only way to make this area a definitive responsibility between each of the components.
From my personal experience with MVC frameworks I would say:
Model is an object that is representing database table it should be
pure and should not contain any additional logic.
Controller is the place where are made the decisions and other
custom logic, so the authorization should be in the controller. It
could be designed some hook that can check if the user is authorized
or not in all needed places so you wont have a code repetition DRY.
The best way to give permission to user if you are using a typical
REST architecture is to make a token , save it in the databse and on
client side and verify this token on every request. If you are using
web browser app you can use server-side sessions for authorization (
Its much more easier).
So my propose is to keep the authorization logic in the Controller.
I'll use Rails as an example. The authorization library, pundit, places authorization firmly within the "model" domain - this is enforced through their helper methods.
Suppose you have a ShoppingBag model. You might want to create a ShoppingBag
class ShoppingBagController
def create
authorize ShoppingBag.new, current_user
end
end
It works really well if you have a 1-1 mapping between a model and a controller. But what if you need a second controller on the same model? Now you're stuck!
class DiscountedShoppingBagController
def create
authorize ShoppingBag.new, current_user # does not work for us. we want a slightly different authorization, on the same model.
end
end
It's for that reason I dislike pundit, and CanCanCan. Authorization at the controller level, for me, is ideal. Doing so on the model level limits me too much, without any commensurate gain.