Security Implementation In Spring Boot

Posted By : Pawan Kumar Tiwari | 31-Jan-2018

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Securing a web application is the most important task to deal with. It ensures that the application is non-compromisable and do the exact work for which it is designed to. Developing an application in SpringBoot is a pretty messy work because it includes lots of work to do.

Here we will discuss demonstrate a basic web application with the Spring Security enabled that will ensure only authorized user can see the internal pages.

Start creating a project:

We will use https://start.spring.io to create a maven project with required dependencies. Here one can choose the dependencies as per their choice and usages. We will use Web and Security for our project as we will use HTML as the view after selecting dependancies click generate project. Your project will be downloaded with all the selected dependencies in pom.XML file.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
	xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
	<modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>

	<groupId>com.example</groupId>
	<artifactId>demo</artifactId>
	<version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
	<packaging>jar</packaging>

	<name>demo</name>
	<description>Demo project for Spring Boot</description>

	<parent>
		<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
		<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>
		<version>1.5.10.RELEASE</version>
		<relativePath/> <!-- lookup parent from repository -->
	</parent>

	<properties>
		<project.build.sourceEncoding>UTF-8</project.build.sourceEncoding>
		<project.reporting.outputEncoding>UTF-8</project.reporting.outputEncoding>
		<java.version>1.8</java.version>
	</properties>

	<dependencies>
		<dependency>
			<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
			<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-security</artifactId>
		</dependency>
		<dependency>
			<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
			<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
		</dependency>

		<dependency>
			<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
			<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-test</artifactId>
			<scope>test</scope>
		</dependency>
		<dependency>
			<groupId>org.springframework.security</groupId>
			<artifactId>spring-security-test</artifactId>
			<scope>test</scope>
		</dependency>
	</dependencies>

	<build>
		<plugins>
			<plugin>
				<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
				<artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
			</plugin>
		</plugins>
	</build>


</project>

This is how the genrated POM.XML file will look like. It contains all the dependancies that we have selected.

We will create a home.html file in src/main/resources/template to show some clickable message that will redirect the page to the login page.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:th="http://www.thymeleaf.org" xmlns:sec="http://www.thymeleaf.org/thymeleaf-extras-springsecurity3">
    <head>
        <title>Spring Security Example</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1>Welcome!</h1>

        <p>Click <a th:href="@{/hello}">click here </a> to see a greeting.</p>
    </body>
</html>

As, you can see this page include a link "/hello" that is defined in another html file hello.html in the same location :

src/main/resources/template/hello.html

This page will show the message hello with username.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:th="http://www.thymeleaf.org"
      xmlns:sec="http://www.thymeleaf.org/thymeleaf-extras-springsecurity3">
    <head>
        <title>Hello World!</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1>Hello world!</h1>
    </body>
</html>

Now, we will configure Spring MVC and set up all the things to expose these templates. Now create a class MyMvcConfig.java it will contain all the configuration for mvc application. We will create MyMvcConfig.java in our project at src/main/java/com.example.demo/MyMvcConfig.java

package com.example.demo;

import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.config.annotation.ViewControllerRegistry;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.config.annotation.WebMvcConfigurerAdapter;

@Configuration
public class MyMvcConfig extends WebMvcConfigurerAdapter {
    
    @Override
    public void addViewControllers(ViewControllerRegistry registry) {
        registry.addViewController("/home").setViewName("home");
        registry.addViewController("/").setViewName("home");
        registry.addViewController("/hello").setViewName("hello");
        registry.addViewController("/login").setViewName("login");
    }

}

Setting up Spring Security:

At this point, anyone can see the secret page as we have not set any security measures to prevent unauthorized access. To do the same, we need to add spring security i our class path. We will add maven dependancy in our pom.xml file.

<dependency>
 <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
 <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-security</artifactId>
</dependency>

Now, we will create WebSecurityConfig.java at the same location src/main/java/com.example.demo/WebSecurityConfig.java to ensures the authorized access to the secret pages. This ensures that the only authenticated users can see the secret pages after successful login.

package com.example.demo;

import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
import org.springframework.security.config.annotation.authentication.builders.AuthenticationManagerBuilder;
import org.springframework.security.config.annotation.web.builders.HttpSecurity;
import org.springframework.security.config.annotation.web.configuration.WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter;
import org.springframework.security.config.annotation.web.configuration.EnableWebSecurity;

@Configuration
@EnableWebSecurity
public class WebSecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {
    @Override
    protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
        http
            .authorizeRequests()
                .antMatchers("/", "/home").permitAll()
                .anyRequest().authenticated()
                .and()
            .formLogin()
                .loginPage("/login")
                .permitAll()
                .and()
            .logout()
                .permitAll();
    }

    @Autowired
    public void configureGlobal(AuthenticationManagerBuilder auth) throws Exception {
        auth
            .inMemoryAuthentication()
                .withUser("user").password("password").roles("USER");
    }
}

Now, we will create a login page login.html for login purpose. After successfull it will redirect to the secret pages that is required authorization.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:th="http://www.thymeleaf.org"
      xmlns:sec="http://www.thymeleaf.org/thymeleaf-extras-springsecurity3">
    <head>
        <title>Spring Security Example </title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <div th:if="${param.error}">
            Invalid username and password.
        </div>
        <div th:if="${param.logout}">
            You have been logged out.
        </div>
        <form th:action="@{/login}" method="post">
            <div><label> User Name : <input type="text" name="username"/> </label></div>
            <div><label> Password: <input type="password" name="password"/> </label></div>
            <div><input type="submit" value="Sign In"/></div>
        </form>
    </body>
</html>

After successfull login, it will redirect to the welcome page that will show the Welcome message with userName. To show the message, we will create a file hello.html in the same location.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:th="http://www.thymeleaf.org"
      xmlns:sec="http://www.thymeleaf.org/thymeleaf-extras-springsecurity3">
    <head>
        <title>Hello World!</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1 th:inline="text">Hello [[${#httpServletRequest.remoteUser}]]!</h1>
        <form th:action="@{/logout}" method="post">
            <input type="submit" value="Sign Out"/>
        </form>
    </body>
</html>