JWT Authorization in Microservices with Spring boot - java

I have to build an application by using microservice architecture. I divided the whole system into multiple components and each component represents a spring boot project. There are several spring boot projects around 6. I have used the eureka server to register all the services for load balancing. A separate Spring boot project has been developed for the web portal and that application contains authentication, authorization with spring security, and JWT protocol. Now I have 7 projects including a web portal and each project has controller classes under the controller's package.
Now I need to know the following things,
SignUp and SignIn request come to the web portal and after signing a JWT token is generated and it is sent to the client but the Authorization part is only available in the SecurityConfig class on the web portal. So should I send all the requests from the client to a component through the web portal each and every time after authenticated?
Client ----------------> Web Portal ------------------>Service/Component
I need to know that can I send a request to another component/service directly like below?
username + password
Client ---------------------------------------> Web Portal
JWT token
Client <-------------------------------------- Web Portal
JWT token
Client ------------------------------------------> Service/Component

likely yes, because JWT is something available with the user and every time he sends the request, the token shall be validated by the issuer or in cases when we black list some tokens then those requests shall not be processes directly.
In microservices, the API gateways take care of these things and after checking for role and permissions, it forwards the request to the respective microservices based on the incoming route or URI which is then mapped to URI of backend service registered in Eureka server.

Related

Enable Spring JWT Authentication and OAuth2 Authentication on Spring Boot Application

I’m developing a spring boot application where users can register into the system by providing the necessary information. The platform should provide users to authenticate with their registered user credentials or social media login credentials (google/Facebook).
For simple user authentication, I want to create a simple post request to the server with the user name and password and after validating, the server returns a token. I do not want to use the spring security form login here.
But for social media logic, I believe I have to go with oAuth.
I’m new to spring Boot and spring security. Do I need to integrate both JWT authentication and OAuth authentication for this scenario? A suggestion would be highly appreciated
What you. describe about user management (user registration, login, logout) are standard features of OAuth2 / OpenID authorization-servers. You should pick one "from the shelf" either on premise (like Keycloak) or in the cloud (like Auth0, Amazon Cognito, and many others). Many solutions include "social" identities federation.
REST APIs are resource-servers. See those tutorials for security configuration and tests with mocked identities.
UIs are clients. You should use an OAuth2 client lib to handle OAuth2 flows. Find one for your framework Spring has one if your UI is generated on server with Thymeleaf or alike, but there are libs for Angular, React and other frameworks running in browsers.
Spring OAuth2 client libs can also be used in BFF (backend for front-end) scenario when browser client is not OAuth2 (it is secured with session, not access-token) and talks to an app on the server which is the OAuth2 client (spring-cloud-gateway is a sample but you could also write your own app with spring-boot-starter-oauth2-client). This app translates the request with session into into one with access-token before forwarding it to resource-server. The aim is to hide tokens from Javascript in the browser.

How to secure my Spring Boot API

I have Spring Boot API and a React.js/Redux Frontend.
I want to secure all POST routes plus some GET routes. Only one GET route should be open.
What I did so far is using an access_token (Spring Security). But since there is no login (there are no users for this API) the access_token needs to be static in the Frontend - which is unsecure.
So where can I put the access_token so that the client can access but no one else?

Authenticating rest endpoints and the UI using Okta

We have a Java 8 backend application using SprintBoot with an embedded Jetty server.
The UI for the application is a Single Page Application built using React.
Currently I have enabled authentication by integrating with Okta using the spring security SAML extension. When the assertion is posted by Okta to my app, I create a session and the JSESSIONID is sent in the cookie.
This was fine until now when we had a very simple UI serving few UI components.
However, now we have several REST endpoints in our backend and we would want them to be authenticated as well. REST endpoints themselves are developed using Jersey.
If I understand correctly, SAML is clearly not the choice for pure REST based endpoints as SAML is mainly a browser based protocol. These REST endpoints will be called by our UI as well we want them to be independently called via Postman or something for testing.
When a client would call these REST APIs, I am guessing the client should send an Authorization header which should be checked by one of the authentication filters in the backend. After validating the client and the user, the filter should inject the user information in the SecurityContext because Jersey injects SecurityContext in all of the REST endpoints. Then it becomes easier to fetch the user from this SecurityContext.
Upon reading, it seems Okta OpenID Connect can be one choice which issues a JWT. However I am not clear on how to use this. That is, when Okta issues a JWT should our UI or any client for that matter keep sending the JWT in the Authorization header to our APIs and then our APIs in turn should send the JWT to Okta to validate it?
Question is what is the best choice to serve both, a login for the UI and a session and authenticating REST endpoints? Not to mention the REST APIs will be stateless in nature.
When a client would call these REST APIs, I am guessing the client
should send an Authorization header which should be checked by one of
the authentication filters in the backend
In OpendID Connect (OIDC), that value in the Authorization header is id_token which can be in JWT format. This id_token is issued by the OIDC server as the last step for whichever OIDC grant type you choose and applicable to your case.
Upon reading, it seems Okta OpenID Connect can be one choice which
issues a JWT. However I am not clear on how to use this. That is, when
Okta issues a JWT should our UI or any client for that matter keep
sending the JWT in the Authorization header to our APIs and then our
APIs in turn should send the JWT to Okta to validate it?
Think that you have 3 components in this architecture. Relying Party (client), Identity Server / Authorization Server / OIDC Provider and Resource Server (your backend and it's data). When Authorization Server issues and id_token to Relying Party, your Resource Server also knows this token. So when you request for data in resource server, you will present your id_token to Resource Server and it knows if it is valid id_token or not
Question is what is the best choice to serve both, a login for the UI
and a session and authenticating REST endpoints?
OIDC Provider (or Identity Server if you need more complex operation), since OIDC is Authorization (OAuth 2.0 at core) and Authentication.

SAML based authentication for SOAP Web Services

I am struggling with SAML based authentication for SOAP Web Services from last couple of days. I have gone through tons of tutorials to understand the concepts and setting up SAML authentication in my local environment. However, I am not getting couple of things on it.
I have created and hosted the web services and written consumer to access those services (With Java). I have also set up OpenAM to act as Security Token Service (STS)/Identity Provider (As described in most of the tutorials).
My understanding on SAML authentication for Web Services are as below:
A Web Service consumer should authenticate itself with some means (e.g. credentials) and get a SAML response token with certain assertions from a Security Token Service (STS)/Identity Provider (IdP).
Service Consumer then present the SAML token to the Web Service it is accessing and based on the authentication, web service will decide to access/deny.
I am not able to understand following things:
How can I configure OpenAM correctly as STS/IdP. Most of the tutorials I have seen on OpenAM are focused on Single Sign On (SSO) and configuring IdP/SP for the same. Also many of them are on LDAP context.
What changes I have to do in service consumer so that it will request for a SAML token before accessing the services.
How web services will validate the SAML token and allow the consumer to access the service.

Implementing Security for Java Web Services with Spring and Apache CXF

I have an application runs on Java Spring 3. My application uses RESTful services and Spring Security for security. It has a user table and checks user credentials from it. I implemented web service capability to my application(one of customer's wanted web services instead of RESTful services). If possible I want same authentication mechanism and want to look up that database and allow just one user (for now-to admin) to communicate with my web service server.
Should I follow the same way as like my RESTful authentication or is there any authentication and security mechanism for Java Web Services at Spring (i.e. how to deal with logout, how to enable logout mechanism for a client-server web services communication)
PS: I use Apache-CXF.
Two potential ways:
Put a BasicAuthenticationFilter or DigestAuthenticationFilter in front of your CXF Servlet.
Use a WS-Security UsernamePasswordToken with CXF and write a CallbackHandler that a) creates a UsernamePasswordAuthenticationToken, b) calls authenticationManager.authenticate() and c) stores the authentication in the SecurityContextHolder.
Note that the above doesn't cover the concept of logout since login sessions are generally implemented with cookies and the above are stateless approaches. If you really need logout then you should consider using OAuth because you can implement logout by invalidating access tokens.
You could put a security token in the HTTP header you are sending to the REST which the REST decodes and verifies it's coming from an administrative location.

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