Book Image

Spring Security - Third Edition

By : Mick Knutson, Peter Mularien, ROBERT WILLIAM WINCH
Book Image

Spring Security - Third Edition

By: Mick Knutson, Peter Mularien, ROBERT WILLIAM WINCH

Overview of this book

Knowing that experienced hackers are itching to test your skills makes security one of the most difficult and high-pressured concerns of creating an application. The complexity of properly securing an application is compounded when you must also integrate this factor with existing code, new technologies, and other frameworks. Use this book to easily secure your Java application with the tried and trusted Spring Security framework, a powerful and highly customizable authentication and access-control framework. The book starts by integrating a variety of authentication mechanisms. It then demonstrates how to properly restrict access to your application. It also covers tips on integrating with some of the more popular web frameworks. An example of how Spring Security defends against session fixation, moves into concurrency control, and how you can utilize session management for administrative functions is also included. It concludes with advanced security scenarios for RESTful webservices and microservices, detailing the issues surrounding stateless authentication, and demonstrates a concise, step-by-step approach to solving those issues. And, by the end of the book, readers can rest assured that integrating version 4.2 of Spring Security will be a seamless endeavor from start to finish.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)

Anatomy of an Unsafe Application

Security is arguably one of the most critical architectural components of any 
web-based application written in the 21st century. In an era where malware, criminals, and rogue employees are always present and actively testing software 
for exploits, smart and comprehensive use of security is a key element to any project for which you'll be responsible.

This book is written to follow a pattern of development that, we feel, provides a useful premise for tackling a complex subject—taking a web-based application with a Spring 4.2 foundation, and understanding the core concepts and strategies for securing it with Spring Security 4.2. We complement this approach by providing sample code for each chapter in the form of complete web applications.

Whether you're already using Spring Security or are interested in taking your basic use of the software to the next level of complexity, you'll find something to help you in this book. During the course of this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • The results of a fictional security audit
  • Some common security problems of web-based applications
  • Several core software security terms and concepts

If you are already familiar with basic security terminology, you may skip to 
Chapter 2, Getting Started with Spring Security, where we start using the basic functionality of the framework.