Spring Authentication Manager - spring-security

I am new to Spring Security as per my Knowledge authentication manager in spring checks all the authentication provider sequentially. I just want to know wether we can decide sequence of authentication provider on run time ?

AuthenticationManger is an interface, so it can be implemented any way you want. The default implementation has a list of AuthenticationProvider instances and checks them in sequence. So you control the sequence by the order in which you add them to the configuration.

Answering to my own question .
we can implement the authentication manager interface and write number of conditions and thus decide the sequence of authentication providers.

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Keycloak and spring security usage

I have used spring security in the past and understand that most of the features of keycloak can be achieved by using spring security ( ldap integration etc ).
Apart from easy social media login validation, are there any other unique features in key cloak which cannot be done using spring security?
With spring-security you would have to create Spring authentication server and explicitly configure/code certain things for integration with LDAP, OAuth2/OIDC providers.
Keycloak is already OAuth2/OIDC/SAMPL compliant IAM provider. It provides features like User Federation with options like LDAP, integration with other OIDC provider etc.
Keycloak provides SPI integration points where you can customize the request flow, use OTP, perform two factor authentication, add google CAPTCHA, or even your CAPTCHA. It provides role based authorization too if you need.
It also provides event handling integration points for events like Login, logout, refresh token, etc.
Keycloak Community will keep adding new features or keep supporting it w.r.t. changes in OAuth2, OIDC, SAML. You don't need to worry about updating your code time to time. Along with this, security updates will be there.
There are many more features.
Most importantly, why reinvent the wheel, if you get these many features and good support.
Keycloak allows you:
to use multiple user storage and get users from multiple LDAP/AD or Kerberos or use without any LDAP.
to login once (SSO) and forget about to login from another application with GUI;
to use one authorization server for multiple application by separation them by realms. One thing should be noted: keycloak could be installed on multiple nodes for better reliability; This also could helpful when application become big and once you decide to separate it on multiple.
to add user additional attributes and fields during get user info without coding (trivial example - set phone number) or specific roles (on realm or even client level) or groups and use all this on the top of an AD attributes;
to configure password rules like password expiration, e-mail validation and so on;
to set up 2-factor authorization with SMS or Email.
These things I think could be implemented using Spring Security, but it takes more time than Keycloak installation and configuration. Personally, I am using Keycloak in multiple commercial projects and could claim that Keycloak is good.

Multi tenancy for spring security

how can i apply spring security for multitenant web application?
My web application has to be supported for multi-tenants i.e http://:/springapp/appollo---uses ldap for authentication
http://:/springapp/fortis----uses local database for authentication
http://:/springapp/manipal---uses oath for authentication
how can i apply spring security so that is supports for all the tenants
It might look trivial, though this is not a simple case...
Basically, all you need to do is to create a (Spring) Filter in your webapp, that will catch all requests, and by the subdomain of the referrer it will decide what authentication method to use (it can be achieved by a simple table in the DB, that will map a subdomain to an enum, e.g. 'oAuth', 'SAML', 'local', etc. This Filter should be placed before any other authentication filter, and as I said , it will technically decide which auth method to use.
I had to tackle this kind of scenario, and the best solution - as far as I think - was to support one authentication method, and then creating a "bridge" to other authentication methods, as needed. For example, the main authentication method is oAuth2.0. Then, in cases where you need other types of authentication, you create "adapters", or "bridges", to the other mechanisms. So if you need to support LocalDB for cusomerB, and AD for customerC, then you adapt from oAuth to localDB or to AD. In my case, I had to support SAML, so I've created a bridge from oAuth to SAML, because it is not trivial for the same Spring-app to support both oAuth and SAML. (Supporting AD and LocalDB from oAuth are much easier, I think.)
How it happens? you wrap your local DB to be an oAuth-provider, so your app will connect to it. and the same for your AD-connector. You have to parse the URL that the user enters, and you get the "tenant". Then you go to your DB, where you map from the tenant to the needed authentication mechanism, and you know what "bridge" to use.
HTH.

Authorization using Spring-Security (or) Spring only

I have question related to authorization and spring security. To implement authorization checks in one of my services (under a Service Oriented Architecture environment), I was trying to see if I can use Spring-Security. While going through the Spring Security documentation, I read here that spring security uses spring's AOP internally.
Ref: You can elect to perform method authorization using AspectJ or Spring AOP, or you can elect to perform web request authorization using filters. You can use zero, one, two or three of these approaches together. The mainstream usage pattern is to perform some web request authorization, coupled with some Spring AOP method invocation authorization on the services layer.
We are already using Spring AOP in our service implementations. In my case, the requests that will be coming to my RESTful service will carry a custom built token object that should be processed to perform authorization checks.
Based on this, I would like to understand if I can simply use Spring and create an Aspect to catch an inbound request, extract and process the associated (custom built) token and continue/reject the request based on the result ? Do I need spring-security, given that the communication channel is already secured using HTTPS ?
Thanks,
SGSI
For a similar situation we did the following a long time back:
Used an HTTP filter to extract a token from HTTP headers for each request.
Stored the extracted header to thread context.
Added an aspect around service method calls to check the thread context for the token.
This strategy worked well for us. For last many years I have been using Spring Security since it has a more tested and comprehensive implementation for such problems.
If you wish to write your own token-passing implementation, you can check the source code for the Spring Security class SecurityContextHolder that provides multiple ways of passing security information on the execution thread.

spring security Authentication with Windows AD, Authorization with Spring Security ACL

Spring security gurus,
I am new to spring security so please bear with me if my questions are not clear.
I am trying to implement role based access control using spring security 3.x. Individual users are stored in Windows AD without groups so we cannot simply map groups to authorities as some samples demonstrated.
So my plan is to use Windows AD for authentication purpose only, but the user <-> roles relationship to be maintained by Spring security itself.
However, mapping individual user to roles would be very tedious so my question is if possible to configure users <-> groups <-> roles in spring security but the authentication part has to be done by Windows AD?
As spring security is highly flexible I believe my requirements are achievable. Can someone give some pointers on where I should look at please?
The more details the better for newbies like me :=)
Thank you in advance.
Aaron Li
EDIT 1: To add onto my question in particular, can I utilize the Spring database tables authorities, groups, group_authorities, group_members to implement a simple role based authroization logic? But I can't use "users" table as ealier explained the user details will have to be stored in Windows AD so the authentication of the users need to be done using Windows AD.
Any advices?
Thanks
Aaron
First some clarification on the terminology: Authorities, usually consisting of roles in Spring Security, are application-wide permissions. ACLs (Access Control Lists) on the other hand, specify permissions on specific domain objects. Just as you understand the difference. AD usually contains authorities/roles, but not ACLs.
If you don't want to use the authorities from AD, you can do your own implementation of UserDetailsContextMapper and inject it in your instance of ActiveDirectoryLdapAuthenticationProvider. See the Spring Security reference documentation how to specify a custom authentication-provider.
If you want to use the tables (authorities etc) of reference schema, you can use JdbcDaoImpl to load the user details. You then have to insert the users in the users table but not any passwords since authentication is done through AD. If you want to get rid of the users table however, you must customize the implementation.

How to store spring security session information in redis?

I am using Spring security for Authentication and Authorization in my application. I am using Neo4j database as backend and implemented userDetailsService for authentication.
However, whenever my application restarts, user is forced to login once again.
To overcome this, i am thinking to store session information in redis database and load the data to Spring security Context whenever application gets started.
Kindly pass on if there are any articles and pointers to implement the same.
I am thinking of following implementation for it,
1) For every successful authentication, store user details and session details in redis.
This must be implemented in loadUserByUsername() method of UserDetailsService implementation
2) Remove the data from redis, whenver user logs out, Where can i do this information? Is there any spring security function where i can call this
3) Load all the data from redis to spring security whenever application restarts, again where do i need to write this logic?
Please let me know if i have missed any information.
All you need to do is to implement a
SecurityContextRepository that handles security context storage to reds
Eventually a custom filter that retrieves/ stores session information (GenericFilterBean)
I think it is possible to just give the standard filter a different repository, but I am not sure, I needed my own implementation anyway...
Store session in a redis is out-of the box functionality now
http://docs.spring.io/spring-session/docs/current/reference/html5/guides/httpsession.html
You need to configure remember-me feature of Spring Security.
Remember-me or persistent-login authentication refers to web sites being able to remember the identity of a principal between sessions. This is typically accomplished by sending a cookie to the browser, with the cookie being detected during future sessions and causing automated login to take place. Spring Security provides the necessary hooks for these operations to take place, and has two concrete remember-me implementations. One uses hashing to preserve the security of cookie-based tokens and the other uses a database or other persistent storage mechanism to store the generated tokens.
More information available in Spring Security documentation:
http://static.springsource.org/spring-security/site/docs/3.1.x/reference/remember-me.html
You can use out of box implementations or inject your own (aforementioned redis).
As Luke Taylor said, Tomcat's default action is serialize/deserialize sessions on container restart.
Here
pathname attribute of standard manager is the name of the serialization file. If you dont specify a path name attirbute the default is SESSIONS.SER
If you dont want to have sesssions back when restarted, you need to specify it as empty string value..

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