Spring security with vaadin combined with thymeleaf - spring-security

Question

The spring security annotations are ignored on the Vaadin views; I have a #DenyAll at the class level but the view is rendered anyway.
The project combines thymeleaf and vaadin within spring boot. The first for a fast rendering of a large HTML with command and events over a websocket, the latter for ease of developing the administrative screens. Vaadin is setup under "/vdn/", spring MVC with thymeleaf under "/".
Spring security works correctly in thymeleaf; login, logout, and the sec:authorize correctly hides or shows parts of the generated HTML. But the security tag on the Vaadin view is ignored.
#Route("/")
#StyleSheet("context://../vaadin.css")
#DenyAll
public class MainView extends AppLayout {
Based on the documentation (https://vaadin.com/docs/latest/security/enabling-security) if no annotation is present the view should not be shown at all, it however is. So somehow Vaadin is not picking up the Spring security. Any suggestions what is missing?
#Configuration
#EnableWebSecurity
public class WebSecurityConfig {
#Autowired
private DataSource dataSource;
#Autowired
public void configAuthentication(AuthenticationManagerBuilder auth) throws Exception {
auth.jdbcAuthentication().passwordEncoder(new BCryptPasswordEncoder()) //
.dataSource(dataSource) //
.usersByUsernameQuery("select username, password, enabled from person where username=?") //
.authoritiesByUsernameQuery("select username, role from person where username=?") //
;
}
#Bean
public SecurityFilterChain filterChain(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
http.authorizeRequests() //
.anyRequest().authenticated() //
.and() //
.formLogin() //
.and() //
.csrf().disable() // needed for vaadin https://tutorialmeta.com/question/server-connection-lost-after-successful-login-with-spring-security
.logout()
.invalidateHttpSession(true)
.deleteCookies("JSESSIONID")
;
return http.build();
}
}

Answer 1

As mentioned in the comments as well, in order for the Vaadin View-Based security to work, it should be enabled first by extending your security configuration class from VaadinWebSecurity (for V23.2+) or VaadinWebSecurityConfigurerAdapter (older versions). You can refer to the documentation here: https://vaadin.com/docs/latest/security/enabling-security/#security-configuration-class
When extending from either of the above classes, if you are overriding the void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception method (which is needed almost always), do not forget to call super.configure(http); in the correct order mentioned that mentioned in the documentation. This is important as the viewAccessChecker bean is enabled through this call, and this is what you need to have the View-Based security work.
Note: You probably have seen the chain of calls on http.authorizeRequests() (which is of type ExpressionInterceptUrlRegistry) in many tutorials and documentations. Once the .anyRequest().PermitAll() or some similar method is called on it, it does not accept any more configuration of those pattern matching configurations, so it is important to configure your custom pattern matching configs before the call to super.configure(http); (as shown in the mentioned documentation).
Finally, setting the login form which is done in the documentation via calling setLoginView(http, LoginView.class); is an important step, as not only does it introduce your custom login view to the viewAccessChecker bean, but, it also enables Spring Security's form-based login feature which is needed for the view-based security mechanism to work properly.
If you have all the steps mentioned above in order, then those access annotations such as #DenyAll or #RolesAllowed are taken into account and you can expect them to work as documented. If you still have problems enabling it, please provide a Minimal, Reproducible Example that isolates your problem so that the community can help more effectively.