I would like to set the User Object which contains the details of the user into session in my Spring Application.
I would like to use this session object when I would like to retrieve the details of the logged in user on various JSP pages.
I am using Spring 3 and Spring Security 3
I would like to set the User object in the session from my custom authentication class which is not a controller
How can I achieve this?
I assume you have some implementation of UserDetailsService class. You can return any User object implementing UserDetails from loadUserByUsername(). This object is then automatically placed in your HTTP session. It can then be retrieved with:
User user = (User)SecurityContextHolder.
getContext().getAuthentication().getPrincipal();
Spring Security handles everything you need automatically.
Related
I want to implement the login/logout (authentication/authorization) system of my Spring 4 MVC application with Spring Security.
Currently I use a very simple hand-made implementation which basically does nothing more than comparing the entered username and MD5 hashed password with the database values by looking up the user by the username using a custom service method and comparing the encrypted passwords.
If the passwords match, the username of the logged in member is saved in the session and a ControllerAdvice looks up the Member object for the user using the username in the session prior to each request. The checkLogin method returns true is username and password match:
#Service("loginService")
#Transactional
public class LoginServiceImpl implements LoginService {
private MemberDao dao;
//more methods
#Override
public boolean checkLogin(String username, String password) {
String hashedPassword = getPasswordHash(password);
return dao.checkLogin(username, hashedPassword);
}
}
This does work but is not a very elegant solution, does not handle different roles and is probably not very secure. Besides I want to become familiar with Spring Security.
Reading the official tutorial for Spring Security (http://docs.spring.io/spring-security/site/docs/4.0.4.RELEASE/reference/htmlsingle/#tech-userdetailsservice) the way to go to authenticate against the Login service method does not become clear to me.
The tutorial discusses authentication direct against the database but I cannot find anything about using a Service method to perform the authentication and in my layered architecture, the database is hidden behind the Servoce and Dao (Hibernate) layers.
Also most examples in the tutorial use XML based instead of Java based configuration which I use for my application.
After having search a lot with search engines, I still have not found a tutorial which implements Spring Security in a Spring MVC application using a familiar layered structure using a Service and Dao layer.
Do I need to bypass Service and DAO/Hibernate layers and authenticate directory against the database? Or write a custom authentication-provider implementing UserDetailsService as described in this post?
Spring Security 3 database authentication with Hibernate
And is configuring Spring Security possible with Java based configuration only? I am a bit lost with this issue so I hope for some hints...
I'm going to implement a custom authorization based on ([User<-->Role<-->Right]) model and Rights should be compared to controller and method name (e.g. "controller|method").
I used customizing UserDetails and AuthenticationProvider to adjust granted authority (here), but as checked source codes and docs about how customizing the compare of authority I found there is a filter SecurityContextHolderAwareRequestWrapper) that implements isGranted and isUserInRole to compare authority, while the documents say using AccessDecisionManager voters to customize (As I understood). Which one should be used ? Where I have controller and method(action) name to compare authority with them ?
I got confused about Spring security a little. Is there any other resource than official docs that illustrate how it works, I mean sequence of actions and methods and how customize them.
There are several approaches:
Role based, where you assign each user a role and check the role before proceeding
Using Spring security expressions
There is also a new spring acl components which lets you perform acl control on class level and are stored in a database.
My personal usage so far has been 1 and 2, where you only assign roles to users.
But option 3 allows you to create finer grained security model, without having to rebuild your webapp when chaning the security model
Role Based
A role based security mechanism can be realised implementing the UserDetailsService interface and configuring spring security to use this class.
To learn on how to such a project can be realized, take a look at the following tutorials:
Form based login with in memory user database Link
Form based login with custom userdetails service Link
In short spring security performs the following behind the scenes:
Upon authentication (e.g. submitting a login form) an Authentication Object is created which holds the login credentials. For example the UsernamePasswordAuthenticationFilter creates an UsernamePasswordAuthenticationToken
The authentication object is passed to an AuthenticationManager, which can be thought of as the controller in the authentication process. The default implementation is the ProviderManager
The AuthenticationManager performs authentication via an AuthenticationProvider. The default implementation used is the DaoAuthenticationProvider.
The DaoAuthenticationProvider performs authentication by retrieving the UserDetails from a UserDetailsService. The UserDetails can be thought of as a data Object which contains the user credentials, but also the Authorities/Roles of the user! The DaoAuthenticationProvider retrieves the credentials via its loadUserByUsername method
and then compare it to the supplied UsernamePasswordAuthenticationToken.
UserDetailsService collects the user credentials, the authorities and builds an UserDetails object out of it. For example you can retrieve a password hash and authorities out of a database. When configuring the website url-patterns you can refer to the authorities in the access attribute. Furthermore, you can retrieve the Authentication object in your controller classes via the SecurityContextHolder.getContext().getAuthentication().
Furthemore to get a better understanding of the inner workings of these classes you can read the javadocs:
UserDetails - how the user credentials are stored and accessed
AuthenticationManager.authenticate(..) - contract on how AuthenticationExceptions are handled
UserDetailsService.loadUserByUsername(..)- contact on how username lookup failures are handled, e.g. user does not exist
Spel
Instead of checking authorities, SPEL enables you also to check other properties of a user.
You can use these in the URL patterns, but also annotate methods with #Preauthorize.
This way securing the business layer is less intrusive.
ACL Based
The ACL based model was introduced in spring security 3.0, but hasn't been well documented.
Their suggestion is to look at the Contacts XML example, since this one uses their new acl component.
Last this book contains great examples on how to further customize your security wishes.
I'd like my application layer to be aware of which user is logged in to simplify method signatures - for instance method(owner, object) would be simply method(object). I use Spring Security for security though I'd like to keep Spring out of my application layer so there is a separate layer just for that purpose (and DTO conversion) - like a facade (adapter for application services).
How to make the application layer aware of the user context its operating on without using spring?
You would need to register a Filter or HandlerInterceptor that would have a look at the HttpSession and, if the user is logged in, store some kind of User representation in some static ThreadLocal context. Any class could then have access to this static ThreadLocal containing your User object.
You would have to remove this object when the user logs out or session expires. Hint: HttpSessionListener.
I've been looking into using Spring Security for the authentication/authorization of my web application (this will be JDBC based).
However, a core component seems to be left out from my perspective. How do I register/create new users? Is there an out of the box API for that?
Do i need to write user registration and management from scratch?
Things i need to do include:
- Registering a new user
- Resetting passwords
- Emailing a user to activate their account
- Emailing a user to reset their account.
Thank you in advance.
I use Spring Security on my project. The framework does not have an API for user creation or registration as you asked. For Spring Security to be generic and usable across multiple frameworks, it can only take you so far before you have to write custom code. You can't really get a more specific answer about a framework or tool to use because at this point you will just use the frameworks you are already using anyway.
If you've set it up to use users and roles in your database, from your data access layer you would create a record in the user table or update a password (preferably stored as a hash) in that record. And as Aravind said, Spring does provide email support.
If you really want to see one way to do it: I'm using Spring MVC, JSP, and Hibernate. I use Spring's form tags in a JSP to bind a new user form to a Person object, and my controller method passes that Person object to my Dao to persist it.
The controller method signature looks like this...
#RequestMapping(value = "/newUser", method = RequestMethod.POST)
public ModelAndView createNewUser(final #Valid #ModelAttribute Person user,
final BindingResult result,
final SessionStatus status,
final #RequestParam(value = "unencodedPassword", required = true) String password) {
...
user.getRoles().add(new Role(user, Role.APPLICATION_ROLE.ROLE_USER));
userDao.createNewUser(user);
...
}
and my PersonDao would use Hibernate to persist the user like so
#Transactional
public void createNewUser(Person user)
{
Session session = sessionFactory.getCurrentSession();
session.save(user);
session.flush();
}
Have a look at my answer here.
"I have implemented a JAVA project for this use case. It is open
source, based on Spring-Security. A release version is on
Maven-Central, so you do not need to compile it, but instead you can
fetch it as maven-dependency to your project!"
<dependency>
<groupId>com.ohadr</groupId>
<artifactId>authentication-flows</artifactId>
<version>1.5.0-RELEASE</version>
</dependency>
As far as I know, Spring Security does not have built in support for new user creation and registration. You will have to manage this yourself. However it does have emailing support. Check here for more on this.
I'm doing some proof-of-concept work with Spring MVC and security. So far I've managed to write a simple web-app which has a secure webpage which requires a user to login and have the correct role before accessing the database and listing some data. I'm using Spring 2.0.8 by the way.
What I require is that, after the user has logged on, is to access the user principal object for the current session to pass into my DAO layer. I'd like to do this through the standard bean wiring, so it will have to be something determined at runtime.
Any pointers to get started ?
Cheers
Neil
SecurityContextHolder#getContext() will return a SecurityContext associated with the current user request.
From there, you can call getAuthentication().getPrincipal() to get the data associated with the logged-in user.
There is no need to inject any bean, the static method in SecurityContextHolder will take care of accessing the correct thread-local data.