Now that we have a high-level overview of the Spring Security architecture and its core classes, let’s take a closer look at one or two of the core interfaces and their implementations, in particular the AuthenticationManager
, UserDetailsService
and the AccessDecisionManager
. These crop up regularly throughout the remainder of this document so it’s important you know how they are configured and how they operate.
10.1 The AuthenticationManager, ProviderManager and AuthenticationProvider
The AuthenticationManager
is just an interface, so the implementation can be anything we choose, but how does it work in practice? What if we need to check multiple authentication databases or a combination of different authentication services such as a database and an LDAP server?
ProviderManager
and rather than handling the authentication request itself, it delegates to a list of configured AuthenticationProvider
s, each of which is queried in turn to see if it can perform the authentication. Each provider will either throw an exception or return a fully populated Authentication
object. Remember our good friends, UserDetails
and UserDetailsService
? If not, head back to the previous chapter and refresh your memory. The most common approach to verifying an authentication request is to load the corresponding UserDetails
and check the loaded password against the one that has been entered by the user. This is the approach used by the DaoAuthenticationProvider
(see below). The loaded UserDetails
object - and particularly the GrantedAuthority
s it contains - will be used when building the fully populated Authentication
object which is returned from a successful authentication and stored in the SecurityContext
.ProviderManager
is created and maintained internally, and you add providers to it by using the namespace authentication provider elements (see the namespace chapter). In this case, you should not declare a ProviderManager
bean in your application context. However, if you are not using the namespace then you would declare it like so:<bean id="authenticationManager" class="org.springframework.security.authentication.ProviderManager"> <constructor-arg> <list> <ref local="daoAuthenticationProvider"/> <ref local="anonymousAuthenticationProvider"/> <ref local="ldapAuthenticationProvider"/> </list> </constructor-arg> </bean>
In the above example we have three providers. They are tried in the order shown (which is implied by the use of a List
), with each provider able to attempt authentication, or skip authentication by simply returning null
. If all implementations return null, the ProviderManager
will throw a ProviderNotFoundException
. If you’re interested in learning more about chaining providers, please refer to the ProviderManager
Javadoc.
ProviderManager
and will call it to handle their authentication requests. The providers you require will sometimes be interchangeable with the authentication mechanisms, while at other times they will depend on a specific authentication mechanism. For example, DaoAuthenticationProvider
and LdapAuthenticationProvider
are compatible with any mechanism which submits a simple username/password authentication request and so will work with form-based logins or HTTP Basic authentication. AuthenticationProvider
. An example of this would be JA-SIG CAS, which uses the notion of a service ticket and so can therefore only be authenticated by a CasAuthenticationProvider
. You needn’t be too concerned about this, because if you forget to register a suitable provider, you’ll simply receive a ProviderNotFoundException
when an attempt to authenticate is made.10.1.1 Erasing Credentials on Successful Authentication
By default (from Spring Security 3.1 onwards) the ProviderManager
will attempt to clear any sensitive credentials information from the Authentication
object which is returned by a successful authentication request. This prevents information like passwords being retained longer than necessary.
Authentication
contains a reference to an object in the cache (such as a UserDetails
instance) and this has its credentials removed, then it will no longer be possible to authenticate against the cached value. You need to take this into account if you are using a cache. An obvious solution is to make a copy of the object first, either in the cache implementation or in the AuthenticationProvider
which creates the returned Authentication
object. Alternatively, you can disable the eraseCredentialsAfterAuthentication
property on ProviderManager
. See the Javadoc for more information.10.1.2 DaoAuthenticationProvider
The simplest AuthenticationProvider
implemented by Spring Security is DaoAuthenticationProvider
, which is also one of the earliest supported by the framework. It leverages a UserDetailsService
(as a DAO) in order to lookup the username, password and GrantedAuthority
s. It authenticates the user simply by comparing the password submitted in a UsernamePasswordAuthenticationToken
against the one loaded by the UserDetailsService
. Configuring the provider is quite simple:
<bean id="daoAuthenticationProvider" class="org.springframework.security.authentication.dao.DaoAuthenticationProvider"> <property name="userDetailsService" ref="inMemoryDaoImpl"/> <property name="passwordEncoder" ref="passwordEncoder"/> </bean>
The PasswordEncoder
is optional. A PasswordEncoder
provides encoding and decoding of passwords presented in the UserDetails
object that is returned from the configured UserDetailsService
. This will be discussed in more detail below.
10.2 UserDetailsService Implementations
As mentioned in the earlier in this reference guide, most authentication providers take advantage of the UserDetails
and UserDetailsService
interfaces. Recall that the contract for UserDetailsService
is a single method:
UserDetails loadUserByUsername(String username) throws UsernameNotFoundException;
The returned UserDetails
is an interface that provides getters that guarantee non-null provision of authentication information such as the username, password, granted authorities and whether the user account is enabled or disabled. Most authentication providers will use a UserDetailsService
, even if the username and password are not actually used as part of the authentication decision. They may use the returned UserDetails
object just for its GrantedAuthority
information, because some other system (like LDAP or X.509 or CAS etc) has undertaken the responsibility of actually validating the credentials.
UserDetailsService
is so simple to implement, it should be easy for users to retrieve authentication information using a persistence strategy of their choice. Having said that, Spring Security does include a couple of useful base implementations, which we’ll look at below.10.2.1 In-Memory Authentication
Is easy to use create a custom UserDetailsService
implementation that extracts information from a persistence engine of choice, but many applications do not require such complexity. This is particularly true if you’re building a prototype application or just starting integrating Spring Security, when you don’t really want to spend time configuring databases or writing UserDetailsService
implementations. For this sort of situation, a simple option is to use the user-service
element from the security namespace:
<user-service id="userDetailsService"> <user name="jimi" password="jimispassword" authorities="ROLE_USER, ROLE_ADMIN" /> <user name="bob" password="bobspassword" authorities="ROLE_USER" /> </user-service>
This also supports the use of an external properties file:
<user-service id="userDetailsService" properties="users.properties"/>
The properties file should contain entries in the form
username=password,grantedAuthority[,grantedAuthority][,enabled|disabled]
For example
jimi=jimispassword,ROLE_USER,ROLE_ADMIN,enabled bob=bobspassword,ROLE_USER,enabled
10.2.2 JdbcDaoImpl
Spring Security also includes a UserDetailsService
that can obtain authentication information from a JDBC data source. Internally Spring JDBC is used, so it avoids the complexity of a fully-featured object relational mapper (ORM) just to store user details. If your application does use an ORM tool, you might prefer to write a custom UserDetailsService
to reuse the mapping files you’ve probably already created. Returning to JdbcDaoImpl
, an example configuration is shown below:
<bean id="dataSource" class="org.springframework.jdbc.datasource.DriverManagerDataSource"> <property name="driverClassName" value="org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver"/> <property name="url" value="jdbc:hsqldb:hsql://localhost:9001"/> <property name="username" value="sa"/> <property name="password" value=""/> </bean> <bean id="userDetailsService" class="org.springframework.security.core.userdetails.jdbc.JdbcDaoImpl"> <property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource"/> </bean>
You can use different relational database management systems by modifying the DriverManagerDataSource
shown above. You can also use a global data source obtained from JNDI, as with any other Spring configuration.
Authority Groups
By default, JdbcDaoImpl
loads the authorities for a single user with the assumption that the authorities are mapped directly to users (see the database schema appendix). An alternative approach is to partition the authorities into groups and assign groups to the user. Some people prefer this approach as a means of administering user rights. See the JdbcDaoImpl
Javadoc for more information on how to enable the use of group authorities. The group schema is also included in the appendix.