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)

Understanding how Spring LDAP authentication works

We saw that we were able to log in using a user defined in the LDAP directory. But what exactly happens when a user issues a login request for a user in LDAP? There are the following three basic steps to the LDAP authentication process:

  1. Authenticate the credentials supplied by the user against the LDAP directory.
  2. Determine the GrantedAuthority object that the user has, based on their information in LDAP.
  3. Pre-load information from the LDAP entry for the user into a custom UserDetails object, for further use by the application.

Authenticating user credentials

For the first step, authentication against the LDAP directory, a custom authentication provider is wired into AuthenticationManager...