RESTful Authentication via Spring

Question

Problem  We have a Spring MVC-based RESTful API which contains sensitive information  The API should be secured  however sending the user s credentials  user pass combo  with each request is not desirable  Per REST guidelines  and internal business requirements   the server must remain stateless  The API will be consumed by another server in a mashup-style approach   Requirements    Client makes a request to     authenticate  unprotected URL  with credentials  server returns a secure token which contains enough information for the server to validate future requests and remain stateless  This would likely consist of the same information as Spring Security s Remember-Me Token  Client makes subsequent requests to various  protected  URLs  appending the previously obtained token as a query parameter  or  less desirably  an HTTP request header   Client cannot be expected to store cookies  Since we use Spring already  the solution should make use of Spring Security    We ve been banging our heads against the wall trying to make this work  so hopefully someone out there has already solved this problem    Given the above scenario  how might you solve this particular need

User · Answer

Regarding tokens carrying information  JSON Web Tokens  http   jwt io  is a brilliant technology  The main concept is to embed information elements  claims  into the token  and then signing the whole token so that the validating end can verify that the claims are indeed trustworthy   I use this Java implementation  https   bitbucket org b c jose4j wiki Home   There is also a Spring module  spring-security-jwt   but I haven t looked into what it supports

User · Answer

Why don t you start using OAuth with JSON WebTokens  http   projects spring io spring-security-oauth   OAuth2 is an standardized authorization protocol framework  As per Official OAuth2 Specification   You can  find more info here

User · Answer

We managed to get this working exactly as described in the OP  and hopefully someone else can make use of the solution  Here s what we did   Set up the security context like so    lt security http realm  Protected API  use-expressions  true  auto-config  false  create-session  stateless  entry-point-ref  CustomAuthenticationEntryPoint  gt       lt security custom-filter ref  authenticationTokenProcessingFilter  position  FORM LOGIN FILTER    gt       lt security intercept-url pattern   authenticate  access  permitAll   gt       lt security intercept-url pattern       access  isAuthenticated      gt   lt  security http gt    lt bean id  CustomAuthenticationEntryPoint      class  com demo api support spring CustomAuthenticationEntryPoint    gt    lt bean id  authenticationTokenProcessingFilter      class  com demo api support spring AuthenticationTokenProcessingFilter   gt       lt constructor-arg ref  authenticationManager    gt   lt  bean gt    As you can see  we ve created a custom AuthenticationEntryPoint  which basically just returns a 401 Unauthorized if the request wasn t authenticated in the filter chain by our AuthenticationTokenProcessingFilter   CustomAuthenticationEntryPoint   public class CustomAuthenticationEntryPoint implements AuthenticationEntryPoint        Override     public void commence HttpServletRequest request  HttpServletResponse response              AuthenticationException authException  throws IOException  ServletException           response sendError  HttpServletResponse SC UNAUTHORIZED   Unauthorized  Authentication token was either missing or invalid                AuthenticationTokenProcessingFilter   public class AuthenticationTokenProcessingFilter extends GenericFilterBean         Autowired UserService userService       Autowired TokenUtils tokenUtils      AuthenticationManager authManager       public AuthenticationTokenProcessingFilter AuthenticationManager authManager            this authManager   authManager              Override     public void doFilter ServletRequest request  ServletResponse response              FilterChain chain  throws IOException  ServletException            SuppressWarnings  unchecked           Map lt String  String   gt  parms   request getParameterMap             if parms containsKey  token                  String token   parms get  token   0      grab the first  token  parameter                 validate the token             if  tokenUtils validate token                        determine the user based on the  already validated  token                 UserDetails userDetails   tokenUtils getUserFromToken token                      build an Authentication object with the user s info                 UsernamePasswordAuthenticationToken authentication                            new UsernamePasswordAuthenticationToken userDetails getUsername    userDetails getPassword                     authentication setDetails new WebAuthenticationDetailsSource   buildDetails  HttpServletRequest  request                       set the authentication into the SecurityContext                 SecurityContextHolder getContext   setAuthentication authManager authenticate authentication                                                continue thru the filter chain         chain doFilter request  response             Obviously  TokenUtils contains some privy  and very case-specific  code and can t be readily shared  Here s its interface   public interface TokenUtils       String getToken UserDetails userDetails       String getToken UserDetails userDetails  Long expiration       boolean validate String token       UserDetails getUserFromToken String token       That ought to get you off to a good start  Happy coding

User · Answer

You might consider Digest Access Authentication. Essentially the protocol is as follows:

Request is made from client
Server responds with a unique nonce string
Client supplies a username and password (and some other values) md5 hashed with the nonce; this hash is known as HA1
Server is then able to verify client's identity and serve up the requested materials
Communication with the nonce can continue until the server supplies a new nonce (a counter is used to eliminate replay attacks)

All of this communication is made through headers, which, as jmort253 points out, is generally more secure than communicating sensitive material in the url parameters.

Digest Access Authentication is supported by Spring Security. Notice that, although the docs say that you must have access to your client's plain-text password, you can successfully authenticate if you have the HA1 hash for your client.

[java] RESTful Authentication via Spring

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