SpringBoot JWT security how to - java

I am trying to implement simple JWT security with token refresh in my web app. Probably, the question has been asked numerous times and I am digging for an answer but can't seem to find it after a month of searching.
I have two models for the user in the database and they should have different role type ADMIN and USER. ADMIN type needs to access his url endpoints and USER his own upon successful email and password login.
I am trying to avoid oauth because I do not need enterprise like implementation.
Could anyone refer me to a good guide that explains how stuff works or just explain by himself with a code sample? You would help me alot! Thanks.

You may want to try JJWT if you're looking for a simple to use JWT library for Java. It's well documented and easy to integrate into Spring Boot apps.
At the very least, you'll need to write your own service for generating tokens (using JJWT), a filter for pre-processing the request and generating an Authentication, and an AuthenticationProvider for performing the actual processing/validation of the token content (again with JJWT) and to populate roles/authorities or any other information that might be required by your Authentication implementation.
This method of implementing JWT based authentication does not require any components from Spring's OAuth2 implementation.
https://github.com/jwtk/jjwt
https://stormpath.com/blog/jjwt-how-it-works-why

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Keycloak and SpringBoot

I started playing with Keycloak, but I have a question. While reading articles, I always found examples where a client (let's say Angular) is logging in on Keycloak, it gets a bearer and then it send the bearer to the SpringBoot application. The backend, so, validates that the bearer is valid and, if so, it allows you accessing the desired endpoint.
But it's not enough in my opinion. I don't need just to login, I would need the entire functionality - let's say I have a backend application and I need a user. I could have a basic todo-application, how do I know for which backend user I am actually accesing an endpoint?
Straight question: how can I bind my own backend user (stored in the DB from backend) to the one from Keycloak?
What is the best way to do it? The only thing that I found online and into the Keycloack documenation is that I could move the logic of logging in from client (Angular) to backend (SpringBoot). Is this the way to go?
Imagine like I'm creating my manual /login endpoint on backend on which I would then call the Keycloak server (Keycloak REST client?) and I would pass myself (as a backend) the bearer to the client.
Please help me with an explanation if I'm right or wrong, what's the best practice, maybe help me with an online example, because I just found out the too easy ones.
OpenID tokens are rich
Keycloak is an OpenID provider and emits JWTs. You already have the standard OpenID info about user identity in the token (matching requested scopes), plus some Keycloak specific stuff like roles plus whatever you add with "mappers".
All the data required for User Authentication (identity) and Authorization (access-control) should be embedded in access-tokens.
How to bind user data between Keycloak and your backend
In my opinion, the best option is to leave user management to Keycloak (do not duplicate what is already provided by Keycloak). An exception is if you already have a large user database, then you should read the doc or blog posts to bind Keycloak to this DB instead of using its own.
Spring clients and resource-servers configuration
I have detailed that for Spring Boot 3 in this other answer: Use Keycloak Spring Adapter with Spring Boot 3
In addition to explaining configuration with Spring Boot client and resource-server starters, it links to alternate Spring Boot starters which are probably easier to use and more portable (while building on top of spring-boot-starter-oauth2-resource-server).
I Also have a set of tutorials from most basic RBAC to advanced access-control involving the accessed resource itself as well as standard and private OpenID claims from the token (user details) there.
Tokens private claims
For performance reason, it is a waste to query a DB (or call a web-service) when evaluating access-control rules after decoding a JWT: this happens for each request.
It is much more efficient to put this data in the tokens as private claims: this happens only once for each access-token issuance.
Keycloak provides with quite a few "mappers" you can configure to enrich tokens and also allows you to write your own. Sample project with a custom Keycloak mapper here. This is a multi-module maven project composed of:
a custom "mapper" responsible for adding a private claim to the tokens
a web-service which exposes the data used to set the value of this claim
a resource-server reading this private claim to take access-control decisions
The simplest way to do it is to consider that the job of storing users will be delegated to your Keycloak server. But you can implement some roles and checks manually with in-memory or any database of your preference too.
I invite you to follow some documentation about OAuth 2 and Keycloak, to make requests to get a valid token for a time period and to make others request inside that time period to get datas. You can use CURL to make requests or web/software tools like Postman.
Be careful, a lot of Keycloak Adapters are deprecated ones since some months.
I would echo BendaThierry's comments. Look into OAuth2 and Keycloak. The Bearer token you receive from Keycloak will have user information in it (typically in the Claims). This way you can have user preferences or features in your backend without needing to manage the authorization and authentication that Keycloak does.
There are lots of great resource include Spring's website tutorials (like https://spring.io/guides/tutorials/spring-boot-oauth2/) and Baeldung (https://www.baeldung.com/).

Custom login form - Spring Security

Does any of you have some example of Custom Spring Security Login form using REST Api? I am actually trying to create my own, and the problems I'm facing are:
How should be named classes, is it User and Role? Cuz I seen many different versions of it.
Where should I post JSON file with login and password?
How should it look like?
Thanks in advance for all answers and examples of your code (github or something).
REST APIs are usually stateless. It does not know something about a session. So i think you're looking for an basic auth to protect your API.
Or you could use openid connect and check the roles based on a token. This would give you more flexibility for pre conditions and post conditions processing a service call.
Here is a good example of openid connect with spring boot and google implementation. Other provider are adaptable. Baeldung - Spring Security openid connect
If you're just looking for a simple solution with basic auth, take a look here
Baeldung - Spring Security basic auth
yes, you can use form login and rest API together, but that means that your rest API isn't going to be stateless, it means that a session will be created and rest APIs are usually stateless, that's why you have to use basic auth, jwt, etc when creating a rest API, but if you really want to use rest API with form-based authentication, I made an example for you, check this link
This example uses Spring Boot, Spring MVC, H2, Spring Security with custom form login, Spring Data Jpa, but again it's not recommended to use form login for rest API.
Regarding to your questions
How should be named classes, is it User and Role? Cuz I seen many different versions of it.
It's up to you
Where should I post JSON file with login and password?
If you are using spring security form-based authentication, there no need to post a json

How to secure the Rest webservice by token based authentication?

I have created few rest services using jersey implementation.
In security concerns, service can invoke by any one. So I decided to use the token based authentication system.
I wrote one filter in spring security which handles every request before its hits the server.
One login service were created so user can invoke this service by passing the username and password for valid credentials it will generates the access token and expiry date and saves it in Hashmap and DB and returned as a response to the user.
For remaining services user have to pass the generated token in header to access the JAX-RS services.
All these process are coded by us i.e., generation,storage and expiration of the token.
Since we have some security API like oauth1,oauth2 in market is it good to provide the security for rest service by above mentioned way???
Is oauth api will suits my requirement . If it is please guide me how to achieve this ?
Please help me out with valuable suggestions ???
Thanks in advance.
We've been in a similiar position before starting with our rest api. The only difference we had no exisitng code. So basically we saw 2 choices
Run our own Tokenhandling, that what you already have
Use something existing, i.e. oauth2
Our main requirement was authentification via token and we prefered an existing solution. So we just run with oauth2 in form of spring-security-oauth2, even we are not using the whole self authorization stuff.
What i like and probably had missed in an own implementation is that a token generally identifies a user and a client combination and that clients can have rights too. Its nice to have this extra layer of security in our rest api, so i can block early on before even hitting one line of our code.
In form of spring-security-oauth2 its proven code, which works and like much of spring its customizable. Example: In our first version we did use the provided JdbcTokenstore for storing the token, but as requirements changed, we just coded our own and switched it in the config.
The disadvantage of using at least spring-security-oauth2 is that the whole authorization flow is normally webbased and needs communication between the client, the user and our app. As this would not work with our clients we had to trigger the token generation, etc ourselfs, which is doable with spring, but needed some code exploration :-)
If i had to build it again with java and where already using spring, i'd go with spring-security-oauth2 and the oauth way again. But when i had an existing working solution and dont need any of the oauth stuff i would keep the homegrown solution.

How to authenticate users from a rest service

I am trying to authenticate users with a REST service I built using drop wizard. From previous questions I found great example of authenticating with openID on github: https://github.com/gary-rowe/DropwizardOpenID
However, I don't want to deal with openID at the moment and simply want users to 1. Signup, 2. Signin
My questions/confusions are:
For Signup: I'm thinking about sending users's username/password as a POST request with the credentials as either form parameters or part of JSON body. However, isn't there a security risk here of sending password in plain text?
For Sing-in I'm thinking about using Authenticator in Dropwizard.
I don't want to store passwords in plain text. What strategy should I follow after I get the users' password in the POST as plain text? I'm looking for some java libraries that can assist in password salt and MD5
Thanks for the shout out for the Dropwizard OpenID project. Glad it was able to get you started.
If you want a pure web form type approach, take a look at another of my projects MultiBit Merchant which provides multiple authentication methods (web form, HMAC, cookie).
You'll need to dig around to really see it working since this project is not designed as a demo as such and is very much a work in progress.
After loading the project, look for WebFormClientAuthenticator which will get you in the right area.
The general principles involved with Dropwizard authentication are discussed in this blog article. Although it targets HMAC you can easily adapt it for web form or cookie using the source code referenced earlier.
It's all MIT license so just use it as you need.
Looking at the docs, we can see that Dropwizard supports a standalone OAuth2 implementation:
http://dropwizard.codahale.com/manual/auth/#oauth2
OAuth2 has several advantages, many of which can be read about here: OAuth 2.0: Benefits and use cases — why?
Things to note:
when dealing with authentication, you should always host over HTTPS to ensure transport encryption
Dropwizard claims their OAuth2 implementation isn't yet finalized, and may change in the future. As a fall back, they do support Basic auth as well, which when used over HTTPS would be still reasonably secure.
Implementing this does not involve using any third party "social" authentication services such as Google or Facebook.

User Token authentication Spring MVC RESTful API

I would like to secure our REST API with user token.
User does an initial request to the API to obtain an access token (must provide own credentials - login and password)
Service find the user by provided credentials
If is a user found, service creates an unique token with time expiration and returns it back to the user (token expiration can be defined as now() + 15minutes - is it enough? What is a standard expiration time for such tokens?)
User must provide this token in all his requests OR asks for new token when is expiring and API process original request
I would like to ask you - is there in Spring framework native support for such authentication flow - I'll be happy with some simple example or URL to Spring doc? If so, what do I need to use? I have studied Spring docs and read many tutorials, and It seems there is a support for everything and I need to know what is the best for my issue.
For token-based authorisation to resources, one framework that will inevitably come-up will be oAuth
oAuth will help you achieve exactly the workflow that you desire e.g. that a user can authenticate and then be given a token to access a defined set of resources via an API. It is however fairly heavyweight and it is definitely worth taking the time to understand how it works and that it exactly fits the picture of your requirements.
The "official" site is here. There are two versions of oAuth, so again this will help you to understand which the the right one for you.
As for Spring Security integration, there is a Spring Security oAuth project. The documentation for this is pretty good both at the level of how the integration works with Spring Security, but also in terms of helping you understand that oAuth is the right solution for your project.

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