Book Image

Spring Security 3.x Cookbook

By : Anjana Mankale
Book Image

Spring Security 3.x Cookbook

By: Anjana Mankale

Overview of this book

Web applications are exposed to a variety of threats and vulnerabilities at the authentication, authorization, service, and domain object levels. Spring Security can help secure these applications against those threats. Spring Security is a popular application security solution for Java applications. It is widely used to secure standalone web applications, portlets, and increasingly REST applications. It is a powerful and highly customizable authentication and access-control framework. It is the de-facto standard for securing Spring-based applications and it is currently used to secure numerous demanding environments including government agencies, military applications, and central banks. "Spring Security 3.x Cookbook" is a repository of recipes to help you successfully secure web applications against threats and vulnerabilities at the authentication and session level layers using the Spring Security framework. We will not only explore Spring-based web applications, but also Java-based and Grails-based applications that can use Spring Security as their security framework. Apart from conventional web applications, we will also look at securing portlets, RESTful web service applications, and other non-web applications. This book will also take you through how to integrate Spring Security with other popular web frameworks/technologies such as Vaadin, EJB, and GWT. In addition to testing and debugging the implemented security measures, this book will also delve into finer aspects of Spring Security implementation such as how it deals with concurrency, multitenancy, and customization, and we will even show you how to disable it. This book gives you an overview of Spring Security and its implementation with various frameworks. It starts with container-based authentication before taking you on a tour of the main features of Spring Security. It demonstrates security concepts like BASIC, FORM, and DIGEST authentication and shows you how to integrate the Spring Security framework with various frameworks like JSF, struts2, Vaadin, and more. The book also demonstrates how to utilize container managed security without JAAS. Then, we move on to setting up a struts2 application before showing you how to integrate Spring Security with other frameworks like JSF, Groovy, Wicket, GWT, and Vaadin respectively. This book will serve as a highly practical guide and will give you confidence when it comes to applying security to your applications. It's packed with simple examples which show off each concept of Spring Security and which help you learn how it can be integrated with various frameworks.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Spring Security 3.x Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Container-based basic authentication on servlet


In our previous examples we used interfaces provided by JAAS to authenticate with loginform.jsp. The previous application had a custom login form design with authentication handled by JAAS API provided by the application server.

Getting ready

  • Create a simple web-app project

  • Create a servlet class

  • Edit the web.xml file for basic authentication

  • Add a constraint to restrict the user from accessing the servlet

How to do it...

Now, we will see the basic authentication. The container provides the login form and authenticates the user and redirects the user to the servlet after authentication is successful. There is no login form involved.

Make the following changes in the web.xml file:

<login-config>
   <auth-method>BASIC</auth-method>
<form-login-config>  

Export the .war to JBoss, restart the server, and access the servlet.

How it works...

In the previous example the container decides the mechanism for authenticating the servlet by reading the web.xml file. Here the <auth-method> tag has defined BASIC as the mode of authentication. We should get a login dialog box popped up when we access the secured resource.

The following screenshots show the workflow of the implementation:

See also

  • The Form-based authentication on servlet recipe

  • The Form-based authentication with open LDAP and servlet recipe

  • The Hashing/Digest Authentication on servlet recipe

  • The Basic authentication for JAX-WS and JAX-RS recipe

  • The Enabling and disabling the file listing recipe