Best approach to store logged in User Id - java

I have small application using JSF 1.1. It is using NTLM for authentication.
What is the best approach to store the logged in user_id, so that could be used in application across all java classes, user_id would be used in almost all jsf pages corresponding java classes.
Any help is highly appreciable.
Thanks

store it in the web session :
session=FacesContext.getExternalContext().getSession();
session.setAttribute("user_id",user_id);

This would depend on how you are performing authentication. If you are delegating the authentication process to the container, by using FORM, BASIC or DIGEST authentication, then you can obtain the Principal object associated with the current request using the following snippet:
Principal user = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().getExternalContext().getUserPrincipal();
The name of the user in the realm can be obtained using the user.getName() method. Under the hood, the container stores the Principal object in the HttpSession instance, but this is not accessible as an attribute using the HttpSession.getAttribute(...) method, in most containers.
The Principal object is also automatically propagated by the Servlet container to the EJB container, when the business method of an EJB is invoked, and you can access it using the SessionContext interface. In an EJB, you can perform the following, to obtain a reference to the Principal:
#Resource
private SessionContext ctx;
public void businessMethod()
{
Principal user = ctx.getCallerPrincipal();
...
}
If you are not delegating authentication to the container, and instead, you are performing authentication using your own scheme, then you must store the reference to the identity of the user in the HttpSession object upon successful authentication, and you must clear this upon session invalidation. Storing it in other scopes is not recommended, as only a HttpSession object has the same lifetime as a user's session with the application.

Related

REST service to return only current user-related resources

I have a REST service implemented using Spring MVC (RestControllers) with token based security (using Spring Security). How can i filter resources depending on user identity? Let's say user has some reports. How can I let authorized user by performing a call to /reports to see only his reports?
Obviously i can make userId to be a request parameter or path variable, but something tells me that this is a bad practice.
I assume i can achieve that using Spring Security features, but how exactly could i do that and, more important, where is the most appropriate place to apply such filtering? Should controllers perform calls to services passing user identity or should it be somehow retrieved at repositories level (I use Spring Data JPA)?
Thanks in advance
You have Authentication object whenever a user is successfully logged in.
It contains Object principal Object credentials and Set authorities.
All you need to do is override UserDetailsService to add new parameters for your authenticated user. Add your userId in authentication as shown in blog
Now when you do
SecurityContextHolder.getContext().getAuthentication().getPrincipal()
this will return you the User object of the spring security.
You can get the user id from here and use this in controller to do necessary actions.

How is SecurityContextLogoutHandler's clearAuthentication not threadsafe?

Spring's SecurityContextLogoutHandler notes that the clearAuthentication flag is used to:
removes the Authentication from the SecurityContext to prevent issues with concurrent requests.
What specific issue is being prevented by removing the Authentication from the SecurityContext? Why isn't simply invalidating the session (which is the other responsibility of SecurityContextLogoutHandler) sufficient?
By not clearing the SecurityContext is the concern that a SecurityContextPersistenceFilter may preserve the current authentication to a new session id? Effectively leaving the user logged in just with a new session?
What is SecurityContextLogoutHandler?
SecurityContextLogoutHandler is a handler which implements LogoutHandler.
What SecurityContextLogoutHandler does?
It performs a logout by modifying the SecurityContextHolder.
It will also invalidate the HttpSession if isInvalidateHttpSession()
is true and the session is not null.
It will also remove the Authentication from the current
SecurityContext if clearAuthentication is set to true (default).
Is SecurityContextHolder thread safe?
Yes, it's thread safe with the default strategy (MODE_THREADLOCAL) (as long as you don't try to change the strategy on the fly). However, if you want spawned threads to inherit SecurityContext of the parent thread, you should set MODE_INHERITABLETHREADLOCAL.
Also aspects don't have any "threading logic", they are executed at the same thread as the advised method.
Credit goes to #axtavt
What is authentication in Spring Security?
Authentication: The framework tries to identify the end user with the provided credentials. The authentication can be done against a third party system plugged into Spring Security.
Let's consider a standard authentication scenario that everyone is familiar with.
A user is prompted to log in with a username and password.
The system (successfully) verifies that the password is correct for
the username.
The context information for that user is obtained (their list of
roles and so on).
A security context is established for the user
The user proceeds, potentially to perform some operation which is potentially protected by an access control mechanism which checks the required permissions for the operation against the current security context information.
The first three items constitute the authentication process so we'll take a look at how these take place within Spring Security.
The username and password are obtained and combined into an instance
of UsernamePasswordAuthenticationToken (an instance of the
Authentication interface, which we saw earlier).
The token is passed to an instance of AuthenticationManager for
validation.
The AuthenticationManager returns a fully populated Authentication
instance on successful authentication.
The security context is established by calling
SecurityContextHolder.getContext().setAuthentication(...), passing
in the returned authentication object.
SecurityContextPersistentFilter
The name is quite explicit. The SecurityContextPersistentFilter interface purpose is to store the security context in some repository.
To achieve this task, the filter delegates the job to a SecurityContextRepository interface.
Spring provides a default implementation for this interface: org.springframework.security.web.context.HttpSessionSecurityContextRepository. This is quite self-explanatory. The repository for the security context is simply the current user HTTP session.
Below is the XML configuration for the SecurityContextPersistentFilter
<!-- Filter to store the Authentication object in the HTTP Session -->
<bean id="securityContextPersistentFilter"
class="org.springframework.security.web.context.SecurityContextPersistenceFilter">
<property name="securityContextRepository" ref="securityContextRepository" />
</bean>
<bean id="securityContextRepository"
class="org.springframework.security.web.context.HttpSessionSecurityContextRepository" />
LogoutFilter
The LogoutFilter is in charge of logging out the current user and invalidating the security context. The task of invalidating the HTTP session is again delegated to another actor, the SecurityContextLogoutHandler.
This handler is injected in the LogoutFilter constructor:
<bean id="logoutFilter"
class="org.springframework.security.web.authentication.logout.LogoutFilter">
<constructor-arg value="/pages/Security/logout.html" />
<constructor-arg>
<list>
<bean class="org.springframework.security.web.authentication.logout.SecurityContextLogoutHandler"/>
</list>
</constructor-arg>
<property name="filterProcessesUrl" value="/j_myApplication_logout"/>
</bean>
<constructor-arg value="/pages/Security/logout.html" /> - it defines the URL of the logout page.
The SecurityContextLogoutHandler is injected as constructor argument at <bean class="org.springframework.security.web.authentication.logout.SecurityContextLogoutHandler"/>
The HTML URL for the logout action is define by the filterProcessesUrl parameter at <property name="filterProcessesUrl" value="/j_myApplication_logout"/>
Resource Link:
https://doanduyhai.wordpress.com/2012/01/22/spring-security-part-i-configuration-and-security-chain/
https://doanduyhai.wordpress.com/2012/02/05/spring-security-part-ii-securitycontextpersistentfilter-logoutfilter/
http://shazsterblog.blogspot.com/2014/02/spring-security-custom-filterchainproxy.html
http://docs.spring.io/spring-security/site/docs/3.0.x/apidocs/org/springframework/security/web/context/SecurityContextPersistenceFilter.html
clearAuthentication flag was added in this commit with comment
Previously there was a race condition could occur when the user attempts to access
a slow resource and then logs out which would result in the user not being logged
out.SecurityContextLogoutHandler will now remove the Authentication from the
SecurityContext to protect against this scenario.
It fixed this issue (same issue on github). Quote:
HttpSessionSecurityContextRepository restores authentication to the session if session is invalidated from another thread if SecurityContextPersistenceFilter execution takes significant amount of time.
I am using Spring + JSF + DWR framework + GWT event service (ajax push). In any time there is at least one thread waiting at the server side for push events. This request is handled by SecurityContextPersistenceFilter which remembers the authentication at the moment of request's arriving to the server. If during the processing of this filter the session is being invalidated (by clicking logout in another tab of invalidating session by id from admin area) then HttpSessionSecurityContextRepository put the outdated authentication to the new session(which is created by JSF framework, so the session is changed during the processing of SecurityContextPersistenceFilter ).
This easily reproducable if some processing delay is inserted to SecurityContextPersistenceFilter.
SaveToSessionResponseWrapper should remember the initial HttpSession and check if the original session was invalidated so it won't set the current authentication to the new session.
http://docs.spring.io/spring-security/site/docs/3.1.x/reference/springsecurity-single.html
Storing the SecurityContext between requests
Depending on the type of application, there may need to be a strategy in place to store the security context between user operations. In a typical web application, a user logs in once and is subsequently identified by their session Id. The server caches the principal information for the duration session. In Spring Security, the responsibility for storing the SecurityContext between requests falls to the SecurityContextPersistenceFilter, which by default stores the context as an HttpSession attribute between HTTP requests. It restores the context to the SecurityContextHolder for each request and, crucially, clears the SecurityContextHolder when the request completes. You shouldn't interact directly with the HttpSession for security purposes. There is simply no justification for doing so - always use the SecurityContextHolder instead.
Many other types of application (for example, a stateless RESTful web service) do not use HTTP sessions and will re-authenticate on every request. However, it is still important that the SecurityContextPersistenceFilter is included in the chain to make sure that the SecurityContextHolder is cleared after each request.
[Note] Note
In an application which receives concurrent requests in a single session, the same SecurityContext instance will be shared between threads. Even though a ThreadLocal is being used, it is the same instance that is retrieved from the HttpSession for each thread. This has implications if you wish to temporarily change the context under which a thread is running. If you just use SecurityContextHolder.getContext(), and call setAuthentication(anAuthentication) on the returned context object, then the Authentication object will change in all concurrent threads which share the same SecurityContext instance. You can customize the behaviour of SecurityContextPersistenceFilter to create a completely new SecurityContext for each request, preventing changes in one thread from affecting another. Alternatively you can create a new instance just at the point where you temporarily change the context. The method SecurityContextHolder.createEmptyContext() always returns a new context instance.
The SecurityContextLogoutHandler invalidates the Servlet session, in the standard Servlet way, calling the
invalidate method on the HttpSession object and also clearing the SecurityContext from Spring Security. SecurityContextLogoutHandler implements the LogoutHandler interface
Traditionally in Java web applications, user session information is managed with the HttpSession object.
In Spring Security(session clearing), at a low level, this is still the case ,
Spring security introduced new way of handling sessions or user session information.
In an application using Spring Security, you will rarely access the Session object directly for retrieving user
details. Instead, you will use SecurityContext (and its implementation class) and SecurityContextHolder
(and its implementing classes). The SecurityContextHolder allows quick access to the SecurityContext, the
SecurityContext allows quick access to the Authentication object, and the Authentication object allows quick
access to the user details.
for example following programing illustrates accesing authentication object and displaying message
#Controller
#RequestMapping("/admin")
public class AdminController {
#RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.POST, value = "/movies")
#ResponseBody
public String createMovie(#RequestBody String movie) {
System.out.println("Adding movie!! "+movie);
return "created";
}
#RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.GET, value = "/movies")
#ResponseBody
public String createMovie() {
UserDetails user = (UserDetails)SecurityContextHolder.getContext().getAuthentication().
getPrincipal();
System.out.println("returned movie!");
return "User "+user.getUsername()+" is accessing movie x";
}
}
once authentication is done it creates a new session is created;
Once session is created it contains information of user .on logout u need
not only to invalidate session but also need to clear the session information
by default in
`isInvalidateHttpSession(`)
checks whether session is valid or not
if session is valid
setInvalidateHttpSession(boolean invalidateHttpSession)
is called . howver invalidateing session object invalidates but session object still contains information.
to clear session information u need to call
setClearAuthentication(boolean clearAuthentication)
method thus becomes thread safe if u dont it third method it information can be retrieved at low level

Session management using spring security

I have created a basic spring security authentication using UserDetailsService and now I am able to validate user. However, I don't understand how to achieve below things:
Once a user is logged in, when next request comes how and where do I check if the request is coming from the same logged in user or other logged in user?
I know the concept of Spring interceptors where I can intercept all incoming request. But is there something in spring security that does this?
How can I start a session after logging in and store values in session for that user?
I browsed through existing answers but most of examples are for logging in.
I would appreciate if someone can give me examples.
EDIT:
I think I should use session scoped beans in order to maintain user's session contents rather than manipulating httpsession directly.
I think you really need to spend some time reading the Spring security documentation and over all JSP, servlet and MVC architecture. You have several misunderstandings,
After authentication, you don't need to start a session it was already there when the request came. Remember request.getSession()we get the session from the request and I am really NOT aware of any other way i.e. instantiating session object and assigning it to request/response. After successful authentication spring automatically sets a SPRING_SECURITY_CONTEXT attribute in session and this variable is later used to determine whether user is already authenticated or not (Spring does that for you, you don't need to use this attribute).
In spring security we set an authentication entry point which has information about login page url and FORM_LOGIN_FILTER which has information about login processing url, login success url and login failure url among few other things.Every request whose session doesn't have SPRING_SECURITY_CONTEXT and auth attribute gets redirected to login page url.
I could give the code directly but it would be great if you read at least few pages of Spring documentation here. Once you understand the concepts and are still not able to solve the problem. Edit your question with detailed problem and we will try to fix it.
At first you need to create an Authentication object using current HttpRequest as below:
public class SessionService{
public Authentication getSession(HttpServletRequest request) {
HttpSession session=request.getSession();
SecurityContext ctx= (SecurityContext) session.getAttribute("SPRING_SECURITY_CONTEXT");
Authentication auth=ctx.getAuthentication();
return auth;
}
}
Then, you can retrieve the session details from this Authentication object by passing the current HttpRequest as follows:
Authentication auth = sessionService.getSession(request);
The above auth object contains the details that you need.

How does #Secured know what role a user is from database?

I understand what #Secured DOES but not really sure HOW it does it.
Can someone explain how #Secured grabs the roles? Is it getting it from the authorities-by-username-query? Can I put any String in the params as long as it's in the database?
User's roles are stored in SecurityContext, or to be more specific in Authentication object that is stored in the SecurityContext. When you authenticate, the authentication information is loaded and stored in the security context. The roles can originate from database, depending on your configuration. In your case they are loaded using authorities-by-username-query query.
When the security interceptor processes the authorization (for instance method-level authorization using #Secured annotation) it determines whether the user should be able to access it based on the Authentication stored in the context.
To better understand what happens under the hood, you should look at the Spring Security Filter chain and Architecture section of the reference guide.
SpringSecurity provides and awesome AOP way of securing methods in
Java Application by using #Secured. Spring logically ORs the roles
listed in #Secured annotation. The collection of GrantedAuthorities is obtained from SecurityContextHolder.getContext().getAuthentication().getAuthorities()
AbstractSecurityInterceptor is the abstract class that implements
security interception for secure objects.
Obtain the Authentication object from the SecurityContextHolder.
Determine if the request relates to a secured or public invocation
by looking up the secure object request against the SecurityMetadataSource.
For an invocation that is secured (there is a list of
ConfigAttributes for the secure object invocation):
If either the Authentication.isAuthenticated() returns false, or the alwaysReauthenticate is true, authenticate the request against the configured AuthenticationManager. When authenticated, replace the Authentication object on the SecurityContextHolder with the returned value.
Authorize the request against the configured AccessDecisionManager.
Perform any run-as replacement via the configured RunAsManager.
Pass control back to the concrete subclass, which will actually proceed with executing the object. A InterceptorStatusToken is returned so that after the subclass has finished proceeding with execution of the object, its finally clause can ensure the AbstractSecurityInterceptor is re-called and tidies up correctly using finallyInvocation(InterceptorStatusToken).
The concrete subclass will re-call the AbstractSecurityInterceptor via the afterInvocation (InterceptorStatusToken, Object) method.
If the RunAsManager replaced the Authentication object, return the SecurityContextHolder to the object that existed after the call to AuthenticationManager.
If an AfterInvocationManager is defined, invoke the invocation manager and allow it to replace the object due to be returned to the caller.
Look at the source code for more understanding.
AccessDecisionManager is the interface which is implemented as AffirmativeBased, ConsensusBased or UnanimousBased orchestrates the voters and asks each in turn whether the requesting user should be let through the #Secured annotation or denied.

Spring Session Management

I'm using Spring for my web app. I have used several SimpleFormControllers. I've created a session in the first SimpleFormController for the login page using:
HttpSession session = request.getSession(true);
How can I protect other SimpleFormControllers using Sessions, i.e. so that other controllers won't load if the user is not loged in.
Thank you
You probably want to use Spring Security.
It's flexible and allows restrictions based on roles.
Without it, you will need to manually check in every controller whether the user logged in or not. Or you'll have to "reinvent" a security framework by adding filter to the webapp.
If you only want to protect the operation of getting the session, you need to write a filter that wraps the original request and overrides the getSession methods. There you can check for login data using the original request's getSession().
BTW, getSession() is equivalent to getSession(true)
To protect the Controller from access outside of the intended Session, you may want to compare the Scoping rules you need with this clearly written Guide.
How to get Session Object In Spring MVC
The author gives an example of creating a Controller annotated with #Scope("session")

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