Using JaaS with Jersey on Grizzly - java

I'm trying to find a simple, flexible way to add JaaS authentication to REST. I found a post that I think leads me in the right direction (See StevenC's answer). It sounds like the servlet container is responsible for security, not the Jersey code itself. I like this idea, but need a little guidance on implementation.
Grizzly is my servlet container and I want to configure it to use JaaS for authentication. For now, a simple username/password combination would be fine, and hard-coding the username/password pairs directly in code is fine. As long as it uses JaaS, we can refine those details later.
As far as what is sent over HTTP, I'm thinking that storing a cookie would be the easiest way to make this all work. Whatever it takes to keep authentication junk away from my Jersey code.
Here's the code to start Grizzly so far:
final String baseUri = "http://localhost:9998/";
final Map initParams = new HashMap();
initParams.put("com.sun.jersey.config.property.packages",
"my.jersey.Service");
System.out.println("Starting grizzly...");
SelectorThread threadSelector = GrizzlyWebContainerFactory.create(baseUri, initParams);
System.out.println(String.format(
"Jersey app started with WADL available at %sapplication.wadl\n"
+ "Try out %shelloworld\nHit enter to stop it...", baseUri, baseUri));
System.in.read();
threadSelector.stopEndpoint();
System.exit(0);
If this whole process works, what's the best way to check permissions for the user? I would probably want my REST code to actually validate permissions at certain points. Am I even on the right track? Is there an easier way? A link to a tutorial would be a great answer. Even an answer like "I did that and it worked" would give me a warm fuzzy that I'm heading in the right direction.
Thanks for any help.
EDIT: Some clarifications for StevenC's comment:
Do you still want to use servlet filters to protect your resources? I'll use whatever can separate out the authentication detail from the Jersey code. It doesn't have to be servlet filters.
What is mean by "configure it to use JaaS"? The original plan was to protect the current API using JaaS. The next phase would be to make the entire API available online. It seemed to make sense to have a Jersey wrapper around the API calls, but keep authentication handled by Grizzly. Grizzly would have to interact with JaaS at that point I believe.
Are you thinking there should be some config that simply causes grizzly to protect your resources? I was considering a two-step process of authenticating the user and based on roles, authorizing the user to access resources. The idea was to have Grizzly handle authentication (using JaaS) and Jersey handle authorization.
"I don't see the need for the usage of cookies with a RESTful resource." It would be wonderful to remove the use of cookies, but how can the be accomplished? The system needs to know if the user is authenticated. I'd rather not ask them to pass a username/password/etc for each call. Even passing a session token as a parameter with every call seems "ugly".
Also, please note that I'm fairly new to REST. I've been doing SOAP for a couple of years, so I may have a "SOAP bias" that may be blinding me from some obvious, simple solution that everyone uses. If there's an easier way, please feel free to share. I'm just trying to learn as much as possible.

I'm not entirely clear what is meant by "configure it to use JaaS for authentication". If there's a simple configuration to have grizzly enforce HTTP authentication protecting URLs, I don't know about it.
I'm assuming from the other question and answer you reference that you want to use a servlet filter. Normally that's configured in the web.xml file of a servlet project. Grizzly is of course often used to start up a server from code as opposed to application config. When I used grizzly in this way I noticed that GrizzlyWebContainerFactory didn't offer any versions of create() that allowed you to specify servlet filters. However I did notice ServletAdapter [1] in the same project that does give you that ability.
As for the filter itself, I unfortunately don't know of a pre-built servlet filter that simply plugs JaaS configured login modules into your application, so you'll likely have to write a bit of code there. It's not much though, just choose the HTTP based authentication method (e.g. HTTP BASIC, DIGEST, etc.), extract credentials from the request accordingly, and login using the JaaS framework. I don't see that a cookie would specifically be needed for RESTful resources. The RESTful architectural style frowns upon keeping sessions. There are plenty of tutorials about JaaS otherwise, so I won't elaborate on that here.
Once a JaaS subject is active (consumer successfully logged in) you can simply get the current subject and check the active principals and credentials using the Subject.getSubject method.
Anyway, this answer is specifically to give a bit more of the details around doing auth with servlet filters, as you requested in the other (linked) question. This isn't necessarily the only way to do auth in a jersey webapp, but it's a fairly straightforward way to do it. I like it because it keeps me from injecting repetitive auth code in each resource that needs it.
[1] https://grizzly.dev.java.net/nonav/apidocs/com/sun/grizzly/http/servlet/ServletAdapter.html

Not sure if you are asking how to secure each resource, but I found a presentation on javapassion that sounds like what you are looking for. He says to use #Context SecurityContext as a parameter.
#Path("basket")
// Sub-resource locator could return a different resource if a user
// is a preferred customer:
public ShoppingBasketResource get(#Context SecurityContext sc) {
if (sc.isUserInRole("PreferredCustomer") {
return new PreferredCustomerShoppingBaskestResource();
} else {
return new ShoppingBasketResource();
}
}

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Vaadin and Spring Security: "/VAADIN/**" route

I have an application with Vaadin 8 and Spring Boot. Currently, I'm in progress of adding authentication to this app. So, I enabled Spring Security and started tinkering with it. Basically, I followed this tutorial: https://vaadin.com/tutorials/securing-your-app-with-spring-security/setting-up-spring-security
The approach, described there, works fine, however, I'm slightly disturbed by the fact that /VAADIN/** path needs to be publicly available (otherwise, Vaadin doesn't work). I mean, of course, I have protected particular pages by their paths (e.g. /admin) and unauthenticated users won't be able to open them, but isn't exposure of /VAADIN/** path dangerous? What if some hijacker tries to send some request to the Vaadin servlet outside of the UI (by simply curling it) with some specific headers/parameters? Is it possible that by formatting such request in some malicious way, the data will be actually returned to this hacker, bypassing Spring Security?
but isn't exposure of /VAADIN/** path dangerous
It is not dangerous per ce. The framework itself has just some generic parts there, like static resources for the client, like the widgetset and theme. Having said that, it is of course to be noted it application design. For example you should not put something that includes confidential info in your app as ThemeResource, but use ClassResource instead and things like that.

How to set session key in cookie for every request in jersey

I am using jersey for REST service. I am deploying the REST service using apache tomcat. How do i set the session key in every response.
I have tried the below piece of code
return Response.ok(response.toString(), MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON).cookie(new NewCookie("JSESSIONID", request.getSession().getId())).build();
where request is instance of HttpServletRequest. I want to is there any configuration in web.xml so that the JSESSIONID is set for every response
Generally speaking (this holds true for many frameworks!) anything you want to be used in multiple places is best done with a filter. I'm not going to show you exactly how you do it, as it is very simple and it is better for you to read the docs, but have a look here:
https://jersey.java.net/documentation/latest/filters-and-interceptors.html
You can apply these to both methods and classes, so you only need to place annotations in a couple of places.
A very useful thing for writing clean code!

Securing a jersey RESTful web service

I'm developing a restful web service that will be consumed by an Android application later on.
Right now, I'm seeking a way to secure the access to my resources:
I found several ways for implementing that on the net, but I can't figure out what is the most appropriate one.
For example, I found that Oauth specifications are more convenient for third-party applications which is not my case.
So what are the most suitable ways for securing jersey APIs, and I'll be glad if someone can provide me with any tutorials/documentations on that.
I'm using a Glassfish v4 server and the Jersey JAX-RS implementation.
After looking at different options I used an authentication filter and basic auth. Very easy to implement.
Some example code:
You need a filter
public class AuthFilter implements ResourceFilter, ContainerRequestFilter {
...
}
And a security context:
public class MySecurityContext implements SecurityContext {
...
}
And a user class:
public class User implements Serializable, Principal {
...
}
Finally, you can add the filters you need like so: (pass your ResourceConfig object to this function)
private void prepareFilters(ResourceConfig rc) {
rc.getProperties().put("com.sun.jersey.spi.container.ContainerRequestFilters",
getClassListing(new Class[]{
AuthFilter.class
}));
rc.getProperties().put("com.sun.jersey.spi.container.ContainerResponseFilters",
getClassListing(new Class[]{
CORSFilter.class, //You might not need this
GZIPContentEncodingFilter.class //You might not need this
}));
rc.getProperties().put("com.sun.jersey.spi.container.ResourceFilters",
getClassListing(new Class[]{
RolesAllowedResourceFilterFactory.class
}));
}
BTW, you can add #Context SecurityContext securityContext; to your resource class(es) or the individual methods for more fine grained access control. The SecurityContext will be injected into the context of your resource so you can access the User object per request with
With this setup you can annotate your REST methods with #PermitAll, #RolesAllowed, etc which gives you a good level of control over your RESTful interface.
I just finished my stateless (without sessions) user auth and management with Jersey.
Let me know if you want a full example or if you want to give it a try yourself ;)
The simplest way would be using the Java EE build-in Container Managed Security model to secure your rest resources as described in this tutorial. It allows you to configure the security based on users and roles stored in a database or file realm in the web.xml or the the classes themselves.
The disadvantage would be that you must start a session, extract the JSESSIONID and send it in each of your requests so that the server can verify it, but that makes your services more 'stateful' and violates the statelessness of the rest architecture.
Another way would be implementing custom security by using WebFilters, like sending the user name and password with each of your requests and verity them based on the information in a special db. If the information doesn't match the information stored in the database a redirect or a special error code can be returend in the Response object.
The best approach I think is using OAuth2 as described in this specification. Dependend on what kind of client you are using (desktop, web page, mobile client) there are different workflows and apart from that lots of benefits like creating tokens for special scopes of your application (read-only or full access,...). Google provides many different apis that can be accessed by the same account. If an applications only needs data from the calendar api, the requested token only gives you access to this special api and not to the entire resources of the account (like mail data, notes, etc). Another point would be that the security handling is decoupled from the client and no password must be stored in the client application.
You can either implement everything on your own or use a open source project like this. It provides a description on how it works and the code is very good but it has many dependencies to spring frameworks. For my use case I've startend replacing them by vanilla Java EE 7 code and create a solution based on the idea of this open source project. The reason behind the replacements was that it's more future-proof and it avoids class loader problems during the deployment.
In the Android app a Authenticator can be implemented for secure storing of the token.

Java webapps security constraints & custom security providers

I'm creating a restful web service using Resteasy. One thing I need to do is to secure the service using a standard HTTP auth request. The tricky part is that the service is multi-tenant and needs to use one of the path parameters to determine the security realm.
There are a lot of articles typical of this link which describe setting up a single-tenant service. What I can't find is what to configure, and what interfaces to implement to describe my own security which is based on a path parameter + the username in the HTTP authentication method.
I envision that prior to calling any of the application logic, tomcat/resteasy would call a SecurityProvider (or whatever) interface with the HttpServletRequest and have me either throw a 401 or return a SecurityContext that gets passed to the JAX-RS handlers. In that routine, I would inspect the path parameters, and make a determination based on parameter+username+password given in the Basic/Digest/Form.
Is there any such beast?
I thought I'd update this since there's bee little activity on this question.
It looks like there's no baked in feature to do what I envisioned, so instead I extended the RestEasy servlet and added the security checks in my override before passing control back to the stock RestEasy servlet.
Seems to work well.

What will tomcat do after I type the root link of a spring application?

Let's say I have an application written with spring framework, and I want to know, when I typed in :
http://localhost:8080/test
link, what tomcat will do to generate response for this request ?
Should it have to pass all filters first, then ????
And after I typed in the url, it always be directed to another link like http://localhost:8080/test/login, where was this redirection implemented ?
If it is hard to explain to me, then please recommend me a book for that, thanks very much !
what tomcat will do to generate response for this request ?
Tomcat will typically send the the request to the relevant DispatcherServlet instance, as configured in your "web.xml" file. This is described in the Spring documentation.
Should it have to pass all filters first, then ????
Yes. Filters are applied before (and after) requests are passed to the Servlet.
And after I typed in the url, it always be directed to another link like http://localhost:8080/test/login, where was this redirection implemented ?
That depends on how you have implemented security. It could be done at the Tomcat level (I think), using SpringSecurity, or hard-wired logic in your Spring MVC controller, or in a plain (non-Spring) Servlet, Filter or (Tomcat specific) Valve.
If you are looking for advice on the best way to implement login / security, I'd recommend using SpringSecurity. SpringSecurity works using Filters.
If it is hard to explain to me, then please recommend me a book for that, thanks very much !
The online Spring and SpringSecurity documentation is as good a place as any. This documentation tends not to spell out exactly how requests get processed in the context of a particular web container, but you should be able to figure the details from the Tomcat docs and the Servlet specification.
If there's a controller that's mapped to that URL, the Spring DispatcherServlet will send the request to it for handling.
If the controller determines that the next view ought to be the one that corresponds to /test/login, then it'll specify so when it sets the ModelAndView.

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