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)

Is remember-me secure?

Any feature related to security that has been added for user convenience has the potential to expose our carefully-protected site to a security risk. The remember-me feature, in its default form, runs the risk of the user's cookie being intercepted and reused by a malicious user. The following diagram illustrates how this might happen:

The use of SSL (covered in the Appendix, Additional Reference Material) and other network security techniques can mitigate this type of attack, but be aware that there are other techniques, such as cross-site scripting (XSS), that can steal or compromise a remembered user session. While convenient for the user, we don't want to risk financial or other personal information being inadvertently changed or possibly stolen if the remembered session is misused.

Although we don't cover malicious user behavior in detail...