revious versions of the framework when users had to configure the filter chain explicitly in theFilterChainProxy
bean. You can, of course, still do this if you need full control of the configuration.
All filters which require a reference to the AuthenticationManager
will be automatically injected with the internal instance created by the namespace configuration (see the introductory chapter for more on the AuthenticationManager
).
The <http>
namespace block always creates an SecurityContextPersistenceFilter
, an ExceptionTranslationFilter
and a FilterSecurityInterceptor
. These are fixed and cannot be replaced with alternatives.
The attributes on the <http>
element control some of the properties on the core filters.
Provides versions of HttpServletRequest
security methods such as isUserInRole()
and getPrincipal()
which are implemented by adding aSecurityContextHolderAwareRequestFilter
bean to the stack. Defaults to "true".
Controls whether URL patterns are interpreted as ant paths (the default) or regular expressions. In practice this sets a particular UrlMatcher
instance on theFilterChainProxy
.
Whether test URLs should be converted to lower case prior to comparing with defined path patterns. If unspecified, defaults to "true"
Sets the realm name used for basic authentication (if enabled). Corresponds to the realmName
property on BasicAuthenticationEntryPoint
.
Normally the AuthenticationEntryPoint
used will be set depending on which authentication mechanisms have been configured. This attribute allows this behaviour to be overridden by defining a customized AuthenticationEntryPoint
bean which will start the authentication process.
Optional attribute specifying the ID of the AccessDecisionManager
implementation which should be used for authorizing HTTP requests. By default anAffirmativeBased
implementation is used for with a RoleVoter
and an AuthenticatedVoter
.
Corresponds to the observeOncePerRequest
property of FilterSecurityInterceptor
. Defaults to "true".
Controls the eagerness with which an HTTP session is created. If not set, defaults to "ifRequired". Other options are "always" and "never". The setting of this attribute affect the allowSessionCreation
and forceEagerSessionCreation
properties of SecurityContextPersistenceFilter
. allowSessionCreation
will always be true unless this attribute is set to "never". forceEagerSessionCreation
is "false" unless it is set to "always". So the default configuration allows session creation but does not force it. The exception is if concurrent session control is enabled, when forceEagerSessionCreation
will be set to true, regardless of what the setting is here. Using "never" would then cause an exception during the initialization of SecurityContextPersistenceFilter
.
Enables EL-expressions in the access
attribute, as described in the chapter on expression-based access-control.
This element allows you to set the errorPage
property for the default AccessDeniedHandler
used by the ExceptionTranslationFilter
, (using the error-page
attribute, or to supply your own implementation using the ref
attribute. This is discussed in more detail in the section on the ExceptionTranslationFilter
.
This element is used to define the set of URL patterns that the application is interested in and to configure how they should be handled. It is used to construct the FilterInvocationSecurityMetadataSource
used by the FilterSecurityInterceptor
and to exclude particular patterns from the filter chain entirely (by setting the attribute filters="none"
). It is also responsible for configuring a ChannelAuthenticationFilter
if particular URLs need to be accessed by HTTPS, for example. When matching the specified patterns against an incoming request, the matching is done in the order in which the elements are declared. So the most specific matches patterns should come first and the most general should come last.
The pattern which defines the URL path. The content will depend on the path-type
attribute from the containing http element, so will default to ant path syntax.
The HTTP Method which will be used in combination with the pattern to match an incoming request. If omitted, any method will match. If an identical pattern is specified with and without a method, the method-specific match will take precedence.
Lists the access attributes which will be stored in the FilterInvocationSecurityMetadataSource
for the defined URL pattern/method combination. This should be a comma-separated list of the security configuration attributes (such as role names).
Can be “http” or “https” depending on whether a particular URL pattern should be accessed over HTTP or HTTPS respectively. Alternatively the value “any”can be used when there is no preference. If this attribute is present on any <intercept-url>
element, then a ChannelAuthenticationFilter
will be added to the filter stack and its additional dependencies added to the application context.
If a <port-mappings>
configuration is added, this will be used to by the SecureChannelProcessor
and InsecureChannelProcessor
beans to determine the ports used for redirecting to HTTP/HTTPS.
Can only take the value “none”. This will cause any matching request to bypass the Spring Security filter chain entirely. None of the rest of the <http>
configuration will have any effect on the request and there will be no security context available for its duration. Access to secured methods during the request will fail.
By default, an instance of PortMapperImpl
will be added to the configuration for use in redirecting to secure and insecure URLs. This element can optionally be used to override the default mappings which that class defines. Each child <port-mapping>
element defines a pair of HTTP:HTTPS ports. The default mappings are 80:443 and 8080:8443. An example of overriding these can be found in the namespace introduction.
Used to add an UsernamePasswordAuthenticationFilter
to the filter stack and an LoginUrlAuthenticationEntryPoint
to the application context to provide authentication on demand. This will always take precedence over other namespace-created entry points. If no attributes are supplied, a login page will be generated automatically at the URL "/spring-security-login" [20] The behaviour can be customized using the following attributes.
The URL that should be used to render the login page. Maps to the loginFormUrl
property of the LoginUrlAuthenticationEntryPoint
. Defaults to "/spring-security-login".
Maps to the filterProcessesUrl
property of UsernamePasswordAuthenticationFilter
. The default value is "/j_spring_security_check".
Maps to the defaultTargetUrl
property of UsernamePasswordAuthenticationFilter
. If not set, the default value is "/" (the application root). A user will be taken to this URL after logging in, provided they were not asked to login while attempting to access a secured resource, when they will be taken to the originally requested URL.
If set to "true", the user will always start at the value given by default-target-url
, regardless of how they arrived at the login page. Maps to thealwaysUseDefaultTargetUrl
property of UsernamePasswordAuthenticationFilter
. Default value is "false".
Maps to the authenticationFailureUrl
property of UsernamePasswordAuthenticationFilter
. Defines the URL the browser will be redirected to on login failure. Defaults to "/spring_security_login?login_error", which will be automatically handled by the automatic login page generator, re-rendering the login page with an error message.
This can be used as an alternative to default-target-url
and always-use-default-target
, giving you full control over the navigation flow after a successful authentication. The value should be he name of an AuthenticationSuccessHandler
bean in the application context.
Adds a BasicAuthenticationFilter
and BasicAuthenticationEntryPoint
to the configuration. The latter will only be used as the configuration entry point if form-based login is not enabled.
Adds the RememberMeAuthenticationFilter
to the stack. This in turn will be configured with either a TokenBasedRememberMeServices
, aPersistentTokenBasedRememberMeServices
or a user-specified bean implementing RememberMeServices
depending on the attribute settings.
If this is set, PersistentTokenBasedRememberMeServices
will be used and configured with a JdbcTokenRepositoryImpl
instance.
Configures a PersistentTokenBasedRememberMeServices
but allows the use of a custom PersistentTokenRepository
bean.
Allows complete control of the RememberMeServices
implementation that will be used by the filter. The value should be the Id of a bean in the application context which implements this interface.
Configures a PersistentTokenBasedRememberMeServices
but allows the use of a custom PersistentTokenRepository
bean.
Maps to the "key" property of AbstractRememberMeServices
. Should be set to a unique value to ensure that remember-me cookies are only valid within the one application [21].
Maps to the tokenValiditySeconds
property of AbstractRememberMeServices
. Specifies the period in seconds for which the remember-me cookie should be valid. By default it will be valid for 14 days.
The remember-me services implementations require access to a UserDetailsService
, so there has to be one defined in the application context. If there is only one, it will be selected and used automatically by the namespace configuration. If there are multiple instances, you can specify a bean Id explicitly using this attribute.
Session-management related functionality is implemented by the addition of a SessionManagementFilter
to the filter stack.
Indicates whether an existing session should be invalidated when a user authenticates and a new session started. If set to "none" no change will be made. "newSession" will create a new empty session. "migrateSession" will create a new session and copy the session attributes to the new session. Defaults to "migrateSession".
If session fixation protection is enabled, the SessionManagementFilter
is injected with an appropriately configured DefaultSessionAuthenticationStrategy
. See the Javadoc for this class for more details.
Adds support for concurrent session control, allowing limits to be placed on the number of active sessions a user can have. A ConcurrentSessionFilter
will be created, and a ConcurrentSessionControlStrategy
will be used with the SessionManagementFilter
. If a form-login
element has been declared, the strategy object will also be injected into the created authentication filter. An instance of SessionRegistry
(a SessionRegistryImpl
instance unless the user wishes to use a custom bean) will be created for use by the strategy.
Maps to the maximumSessions
property of ConcurrentSessionControlStrategy
.
The URL a user will be redirected to if they attempt to use a session which has been "expired" by the concurrent session controller because the user has exceeded the number of allowed sessions and has logged in again elsewhere. Should be set unless exception-if-maximum-exceeded
is set. If no value is supplied, an expiry message will just be written directly back to the response.
If set to "true" a SessionAuthenticationException
will be raised when a user attempts to exceed the maximum allowed number of sessions. The default behaviour is to expire the original session.
The user can supply their own SessionRegistry
implementation using the session-registry-ref
attribute. The other concurrent session control beans will be wired up to use it.
It can also be useful to have a reference to the internal session registry for use in your own beans or an admin interface. You can expose the interal bean using the session-registry-alias
attribute, giving it a name that you can use elsewhere in your configuration.
Adds an AnonymousAuthenticationFilter
to the stack and an AnonymousAuthenticationProvider
. Required if you are using the IS_AUTHENTICATED_ANONYMOUSLY
attribute.
Adds support for X.509 authentication. An X509AuthenticationFilter
will be added to the stack and an Http403ForbiddenEntryPoint
bean will be created. The latter will only be used if no other authentication mechanisms are in use (it's only functionality is to return an HTTP 403 error code). APreAuthenticatedAuthenticationProvider
will also be created which delegates the loading of user authorities to a UserDetailsService
.
Defines a regular expression which will be used to extract the username from the certificate (for use with the UserDetailsService
).
Similar to <form-login>
and has the same attributes. The default value for login-processing-url
is "/j_spring_openid_security_check". AnOpenIDAuthenticationFilter
and OpenIDAuthenticationProvider
will be registered. The latter requires a reference to a UserDetailsService
. Again, this can be specified by Id, using the user-service-ref
attribute, or will be located automatically in the application context.
Adds a LogoutFilter
to the filter stack. This is configured with a SecurityContextLogoutHandler
.
The URL which will cause a logout (i.e. which will be processed by the filter). Defaults to "/j_spring_security_logout".
The destination URL which the user will be taken to after logging out. Defaults to "/".
This element is used to add a filter to the filter chain. It doesn't create any additional beans but is used to select a bean of type javax.servlet.Filter
which is already defined in the appllication context and add that at a particular position in the filter chain maintained by Spring Security. Full details can be found in the namespace chapter.
Sets the RequestCache
instance which will be used by the ExceptionTranslationFilter
to store request information before invoking an AuthenticationEntryPoint
.
Before Spring Security 3.0, an AuthenticationManager
was automatically registered internally. Now you must register one explicitly using the <authentication-manager>
element. This creates an instance of Spring Security's ProviderManager
class, which needs to be configured with a list of one or moreAuthenticationProvider
instances. These can either be created using syntax elements provided by the namespace, or they can be standard bean definitions, marked for addition to the list using the authentication-provider
element.
Every Spring Security application which uses the namespace must have include this element somewhere. It is responsible for registering theAuthenticationManager
which provides authentication services to the application. It also allows you to define an alias name for the internal instance for use in your own configuration. Its use is described in the namespace introduction. All elements which create AuthenticationProvider
instances should be children of this element.
The element also exposes an erase-credentials
attribute which maps to the eraseCredentialsAfterAuthentication
property of the ProviderManager
. This is discussed in the Core Services chapter.
Unless used with a ref
attribute, this element is shorthand for configuring a DaoAuthenticationProvider
. DaoAuthenticationProvider
loads user information from aUserDetailsService
and compares the username/password combination with the values supplied at login. The UserDetailsService
instance can be defined either by using an available namespace element (jdbc-user-service
or by using the user-service-ref
attribute to point to a bean defined elsewhere in the application context). You can find examples of these variations in the namespace introduction.
Authentication providers can optionally be configured to use a password encoder as described in the namespace introduction. This will result in the bean being injected with the appropriate PasswordEncoder
instance, potentially with an accompanying SaltSource
bean to provide salt values for hashing.
If you have written your own AuthenticationProvider
implementation (or want to configure one of Spring Security's own implementations as a traditional bean for some reason, then you can use the following syntax to add it to the internal ProviderManager
's list:
<security:authentication-manager> <security:authentication-provider ref="myAuthenticationProvider" /> </security:authentication-manager> <bean id="myAuthenticationProvider" class="com.something.MyAuthenticationProvider"/>
This element is the primary means of adding support for securing methods on Spring Security beans. Methods can be secured by the use of annotations (defined at the interface or class level) or by defining a set of pointcuts as child elements, using AspectJ syntax.
Method security uses the same AccessDecisionManager
configuration as web security, but this can be overridden as explained above the section called “access-decision-manager-ref
”, using the same attribute.
Setting these to "true" will enable support for Spring Security's own @Secured
annotations and JSR-250 annotations, respectively. They are both disabled by default. Use of JSR-250 annotations also adds a Jsr250Voter
to the AccessDecisionManager
, so you need to make sure you do this if you are using a custom implementation and want to use these annotations.
Rather than defining security attributes on an individual method or class basis using the @Secured
annotation, you can define cross-cutting security constraints across whole sets of methods and interfaces in your service layer using the <protect-pointcut>
element. This has two attributes:
expression
- the pointcut expression
access
- the security attributes which apply
You can find an example in the namespace introduction.
This element can be used to decorate an AfterInvocationProvider
for use by the security interceptor maintained by the <global-method-security>
namespace. You can define zero or more of these within the global-method-security
element, each with a ref
attribute pointing to an AfterInvocationProvider
bean instance within your application context.
LDAP is covered in some details in its own chapter. We will expand on that here with some explanation of how the namespace options map to Spring beans. The LDAP implementation uses Spring LDAP extensively, so some familiarity with that project's API may be useful.
This element sets up a Spring LDAP ContextSource
for use by the other LDAP beans, defining the location of the LDAP server and other information (such as a username and password, if it doesn't allow anonymous access) for connecting to it. It can also be used to create an embedded server for testing. Details of the syntax for both options are covered in the LDAP chapter. The actual ContextSource
implementation is DefaultSpringSecurityContextSource
which extends Spring LDAP's LdapContextSource
class. The manager-dn
and manager-password
attributes map to the latter's userDn
and password
properties respectively.
If you only have one server defined in your application context, the other LDAP namespace-defined beans will use it automatically. Otherwise, you can give the element an "id" attribute and refer to it from other namespace beans using the server-ref
attribute. This is actually the bean id
of the ContextSource
instance, if you want to use it in other traditional Spring beans.
This element is shorthand for the creation of an LdapAuthenticationProvider
instance. By default this will be configured with a BindAuthenticator
instance and aDefaultAuthoritiesPopulator
. As with all namespace authentication providers, it must be included as a child of the authentication-provider
element.
If your users are at a fixed location in the directory (i.e. you can work out the DN directly from the username without doing a directory search), you can use this attribute to map directly to the DN. It maps directly to the userDnPatterns
property of AbstractLdapAuthenticator
.
If you need to perform a search to locate the user in the directory, then you can set these attributes to control the search. The BindAuthenticator
will be configured with a FilterBasedLdapUserSearch
and the attribute values map directly to the first two arguments of that bean's constructor. If these attributes aren't set and no user-dn-pattern
has been supplied as an alternative, then the default search values of user-search-filter="(uid={0})"
and user-search-base=""
will be used.
The value of group-search-base
is mapped to the groupSearchBase
constructor argument of DefaultAuthoritiesPopulator
and defaults to "ou=groups". The default filter value is "(uniqueMember={0})", which assumes that the entry is of type "groupOfUniqueNames". group-role-attribute
maps to the groupRoleAttribute
attribute and defaults to "cn". Similarly role-prefix
maps to rolePrefix
and defaults to "ROLE_".
This is used as child element to <ldap-provider>
and switches the authentication strategy from BindAuthenticator
to PasswordComparisonAuthenticator
. This can optionally be supplied with a hash
attribute or with a child <password-encoder>
element to hash the password before submitting it to the directory for comparison.