How to provide security with Struts2 - struts2

I am new with Struts2 framework. I wanted to make use of this framework. So I wanted to know how we can provide better security using Struts2 framework or how it is more secured?

You can provide Security using the Interceptors. Interceptors are good way to handle possible script attack.
You can write your own custom interceptor and can implement security feature using OWASP(Open Web Application Security Project descriptions.
[http://www.mkyong.com/struts2/struts-2-creating-own-interceptor/][1]
You can took a look on how to write custom interceptor.
https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Main_Page
OWASP provide solutions for security feature like xxas attack.

Related

How to implement JWT token based authentication mechanism with Apache Shiro?

I have a web application in which Authorization is handled by Apache Shiro. Now we need to convert it to restful service and need to add an authentication mechanism . I am looking for a possibility to keep Shiro itself for authorization, so that code changes are minimal, and JWT for authentication. Please suggest me how can I achieve it. Is there any framework available for it?
I made a library to achieve this.
https://github.com/panchitoboy/shiro-jwt
You only have to implement UserDefault and UserRepository with your bussines logic.
It's based on apache-shiro, i have created a filter based on the shiro AuthenticatingFilter.
Regards,

Spring Security - Struts2 Integration

I am developing a dynamic web application in Eclipse.
I am using Struts2 as my framework along with Hibernate as my ORM.
I need to implement role based access control for which I found Spring Security to be ideal.
However, I am having difficulty integrating it to my project.
I need help integrating, for which any help/advice/tutorial would be humbly accepted.
I found this website to be quite useful for beginners dealing with web development technologies

Which authentication/authorization solution to use for a java web project?

What options do I have to enforce authentication/authorization in a java web app ?
From my research, there's:
JAAS
JNDI
Spring security
Any others ? Does JEE5 or JEE6 have anything new ?
if you do not want to implement the identity-provider by yourself, you can consider using OpenID. This way, you can use any OpenID provider to provide the authentication/authorization.
In addition, you can consider OAuth2.
Do not mix between the two, there are many posts here that can explain the differences...
See Securing Web Applications chapiter for JEE6. Also you can consider Apache Shiro as alternative for Spring Security. If you already use Spring Framework then just go with Spring Security.

Grails Spring Security plugin Access Control/Authorization without Authentication?

My problem:
I would love to use the Spring Security plugin's access control/authorization mechanism with my Grails application without having to use the plugin's authentication mechanism. The various Grails Spring Security plugin examples (like this one) I've found combine these two functions. Is there an easy way to just do access control?
Background:
I would like to add roles-based access control to my existing app. I would love to either just annotate my controllers or use the Config.groovy map approach for setting up the access control.
My app already has a user domain class.
The user domain class already handles encrypting passwords using BCrypt.
The app does not have a "role" domain class.
I already have controller actions, views and business logic for handling logging in and logging out. I have no interest in replacing this with the plugin's implementation.
On the right track, but not quite helpful:
I know this is possible to do, as explained in this other question: BUT, that questions and its answers explains how to do it in a Java app using the raw Spring Security framework. I would love for someone to lay out how to do this in a way that is compatible with the latest version (1.2.7.3 as of this writing) of the Grails Spring Security plugin. I don't want to reinvent wheels that have already been taken care of by the plugin.
In addition, this example explains how to do some of this, but it appears to be outdated because it is based on an older version of the plugin that uses Spring Security 2.x. It also only uses custom authentication for one piece of the app, while it looks like it still uses the Spring Security plugin's domain classes elsewhere.
How to do it?
Can someone lay out an approach for me?
I assume I need to create my Role domain class.
After that I assume it will involve custom Authentication objects and the like. But how do I hook them into use the plugin's existing code?
You could go with a custom authentication provider and I have an updated version that I did as part of a recent talk. See this blog post which has a sample app and link to a video of the talk: http://burtbeckwith.com/blog/?p=1090
It would be simple to use a custom UserDetailsService - this is the most common customization done for the plugin and it so has its own chapter in the docs: http://grails-plugins.github.com/grails-spring-security-core/docs/manual/guide/11%20Custom%20UserDetailsService.html
Basically you need to create a Spring Security User instance and Spring Security (and the plugin) doesn't care how you get the data. So your custom UserDetailsService just needs to be a bridge between your current auth scheme and Spring Security.
I ended up creating my own access control/authorization mechanism rather than using the Spring Security plugin. I never could figure out how to separate the plugin's authentication mechanism from the authorization mechanism. Doing the work myself was very easy.
I did the following:
Created a new Role domain class.
Added a Set property and hasMany relationship to my User domain class.
Created a new AuthorizationFilters filter. This is where I put in my authorization rules. In this filter I can check to see if a user has the role necessary to access the given URL and redirect to a login page, redirect to a "not authorized page" or allow them to pass.
This doesn't have the nice syntactic sugar of the plugin and isn't quite as concise either, but it was very easy to implement and understand.

Struts2 + Spring, is the Spring Plugin required?

I'm replacing the service tier in an existing older Struts2 project with Spring service beans developed for another project.
I'd like to just #Inject these service beans into my Action classes.
Is it required to use Struts' Spring Plugin? Or can I add Spring into my Struts web application like I would any other (ContextLoaderListener, applicationContext.xml, context:component-scan)?
Am I missing some reason why the Struts Spring plugin helps me in another way?
Many thanks!
Well you can do the most of the things what you have described in your question as Services layer is completely out of view for the S2 and Struts2 do not care how you are creating your Service layer instances and other things.
Benefits i am seeing of using Struts2-Spring plugin is to delegate creation of Struts2 related things to Spring like Action classes creation,Interceptors,Results etc.
My Suggestion is to use the plugin as you are going to use the Spring in your application so its very good and flexible as well powerful to use the power of Spring DI to create required objects needed by S2 else S2 will use its own data creation factory to create framework component.
Why wouldn't you use the Spring plugin?
It's essentially invisible, uses Spring to create your actions (including injecting other Spring beans), etc.
Guice's #Inject doesn't know anything about Spring beans, AFAIK, so you'd be naming classes manually, they'd be instantiated via normal Java/Guice mechanisms, wouldn't be injected with their own Spring dependencies (unless you did it manually, or via AOP, or whatever).
You'd also need to use non-Spring mechanisms for doing injection in testing, which is fine, but unless you provide more details regarding your usecase, I don't really see a reason to bypass the functionality the Spring plugin provides out-of-the-box.

Resources