How can I use Spring Security without sessions?

Question

I am building a web application with Spring Security that will live on Amazon EC2 and use Amazon\'s Elastic Load Balancers. Unfortunately, ELB does not support sticky sessio

Answer 1

In Spring Security 3 with Java Config, you can use HttpSecurity.sessionManagement():

@Override
protected void configure(final HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
    http
        .sessionManagement()
            .sessionCreationPolicy(SessionCreationPolicy.STATELESS);
}

Answer 2

It seems to be even easier in Spring Securitiy 3.0. If you're using namespace configuration, you can simply do as follows:

<http create-session="never">
  <!-- config -->
</http>

Or you could configure the SecurityContextRepository as null, and nothing would ever get saved that way as well.

Answer 3

We worked on the same issue (injecting a custom SecurityContextRepository to SecurityContextPersistenceFilter) for 4-5 hours today. Finally, we figured it out. First of all, in the section 8.3 of Spring Security ref. doc, there is a SecurityContextPersistenceFilter bean definition

<bean id="securityContextPersistenceFilter" class="org.springframework.security.web.context.SecurityContextPersistenceFilter">
    <property name='securityContextRepository'>
        <bean class='org.springframework.security.web.context.HttpSessionSecurityContextRepository'>
            <property name='allowSessionCreation' value='false' />
        </bean>
    </property>
</bean>

And after this definition, there is this explanation: "Alternatively you could provide a null implementation of the SecurityContextRepository interface, which will prevent the security context from being stored, even if a session has already been created during the request."

We needed to inject our custom SecurityContextRepository into the SecurityContextPersistenceFilter. So we simply changed the bean definition above with our custom impl and put it into the security context.

When we run the application, we traced the logs and saw that SecurityContextPersistenceFilter was not using our custom impl, it was using the HttpSessionSecurityContextRepository.

After a few other things we tried, we figured out that we had to give our custom SecurityContextRepository impl with the "security-context-repository-ref" attribute of "http" namespace. If you use "http" namespace and want to inject your own SecurityContextRepository impl, try "security-context-repository-ref" attribute.

When "http" namespace is used, a seperate SecurityContextPersistenceFilter definition is ignored. As I copied above, the reference doc. does not state that.

Please correct me if I misunderstood the things.

Answer 4

Just a quick note: it's "create-session" rather than "create-sessions"

create-session

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 HttpSessionContextIntegrationFilter. 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 HttpSessionContextIntegrationFilter.

For specific details of the session usage, there is some good documentation in the HttpSessionSecurityContextRepository javadoc.

Answer 5

Take a look at SecurityContextPersistenceFilter class. It defines how the SecurityContextHolder is populated. By default it uses HttpSessionSecurityContextRepository to store security context in http session.

I have implemented this mechanism quite easily, with custom SecurityContextRepository.

See the securityContext.xml below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
       xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
       xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
       xmlns:tx="http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx"
       xmlns:sec="http://www.springframework.org/schema/security"
       xmlns:jee="http://www.springframework.org/schema/jee"
       xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
       http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd
       http://www.springframework.org/schema/context http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context.xsd
       http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx/spring-tx-3.0.xsd
       http://www.springframework.org/schema/security http://www.springframework.org/schema/security/spring-security.xsd
       http://www.springframework.org/schema/jee http://www.springframework.org/schema/jee/spring-jee-3.0.xsd">

    <context:annotation-config/>

    <sec:global-method-security secured-annotations="enabled" pre-post-annotations="enabled"/>

    <bean id="securityContextRepository" class="com.project.server.security.TokenSecurityContextRepository"/>

    <bean id="securityContextFilter" class="com.project.server.security.TokenSecurityContextPersistenceFilter">
        <property name="repository" ref="securityContextRepository"/>
    </bean>

    <bean id="logoutFilter" class="org.springframework.security.web.authentication.logout.LogoutFilter">
        <constructor-arg value="/login.jsp"/>
        <constructor-arg>
            <list>
                <bean class="org.springframework.security.web.authentication.logout.SecurityContextLogoutHandler"/>
            </list>
        </constructor-arg>
    </bean>

    <bean id="formLoginFilter"
          class="org.springframework.security.web.authentication.UsernamePasswordAuthenticationFilter">
        <property name="authenticationManager" ref="authenticationManager"/>
        <property name="authenticationSuccessHandler">
            <bean class="com.project.server.security.TokenAuthenticationSuccessHandler">
                <property name="defaultTargetUrl" value="/index.html"/>
                <property name="passwordExpiredUrl" value="/changePassword.jsp"/>
                <property name="alwaysUseDefaultTargetUrl" value="true"/>
            </bean>
        </property>
        <property name="authenticationFailureHandler">
            <bean class="com.project.server.modules.security.CustomUrlAuthenticationFailureHandler">
                <property name="defaultFailureUrl" value="/login.jsp?failure=1"/>
            </bean>
        </property>
        <property name="filterProcessesUrl" value="/j_spring_security_check"/>
        <property name="allowSessionCreation" value="false"/>
    </bean>

    <bean id="servletApiFilter"
          class="org.springframework.security.web.servletapi.SecurityContextHolderAwareRequestFilter"/>

    <bean id="anonFilter" class="org.springframework.security.web.authentication.AnonymousAuthenticationFilter">
        <property name="key" value="ClientApplication"/>
        <property name="userAttribute" value="anonymousUser,ROLE_ANONYMOUS"/>
    </bean>


    <bean id="exceptionTranslator" class="org.springframework.security.web.access.ExceptionTranslationFilter">
        <property name="authenticationEntryPoint">
            <bean class="org.springframework.security.web.authentication.LoginUrlAuthenticationEntryPoint">
                <property name="loginFormUrl" value="/login.jsp"/>
            </bean>
        </property>
        <property name="accessDeniedHandler">
            <bean class="org.springframework.security.web.access.AccessDeniedHandlerImpl">
                <property name="errorPage" value="/login.jsp?failure=2"/>
            </bean>
        </property>
        <property name="requestCache">
            <bean id="nullRequestCache" class="org.springframework.security.web.savedrequest.NullRequestCache"/>
        </property>
    </bean>

    <alias name="filterChainProxy" alias="springSecurityFilterChain"/>

    <bean id="filterChainProxy" class="org.springframework.security.web.FilterChainProxy">
        <sec:filter-chain-map path-type="ant">
            <sec:filter-chain pattern="/**"
                              filters="securityContextFilter, logoutFilter, formLoginFilter,
                                        servletApiFilter, anonFilter, exceptionTranslator, filterSecurityInterceptor"/>
        </sec:filter-chain-map>
    </bean>

    <bean id="filterSecurityInterceptor"
          class="org.springframework.security.web.access.intercept.FilterSecurityInterceptor">
        <property name="securityMetadataSource">
            <sec:filter-security-metadata-source use-expressions="true">
                <sec:intercept-url pattern="/staticresources/**" access="permitAll"/>
                <sec:intercept-url pattern="/index.html*" access="hasRole('USER_ROLE')"/>
                <sec:intercept-url pattern="/rpc/*" access="hasRole('USER_ROLE')"/>
                <sec:intercept-url pattern="/**" access="permitAll"/>
            </sec:filter-security-metadata-source>
        </property>
        <property name="authenticationManager" ref="authenticationManager"/>
        <property name="accessDecisionManager" ref="accessDecisionManager"/>
    </bean>

    <bean id="accessDecisionManager" class="org.springframework.security.access.vote.AffirmativeBased">
        <property name="decisionVoters">
            <list>
                <bean class="org.springframework.security.access.vote.RoleVoter"/>
                <bean class="org.springframework.security.web.access.expression.WebExpressionVoter"/>
            </list>
        </property>
    </bean>

    <bean id="authenticationManager" class="org.springframework.security.authentication.ProviderManager">
        <property name="providers">
            <list>
                <bean name="authenticationProvider"
                      class="com.project.server.modules.security.oracle.StoredProcedureBasedAuthenticationProviderImpl">
                    <property name="dataSource" ref="serverDataSource"/>
                    <property name="userDetailsService" ref="userDetailsService"/>
                    <property name="auditLogin" value="true"/>
                    <property name="postAuthenticationChecks" ref="customPostAuthenticationChecks"/>
                </bean>
            </list>
        </property>
    </bean>

    <bean id="customPostAuthenticationChecks" class="com.project.server.modules.security.CustomPostAuthenticationChecks"/>

    <bean name="userDetailsService" class="com.project.server.modules.security.oracle.UserDetailsServiceImpl">
        <property name="dataSource" ref="serverDataSource"/>
    </bean>

</beans>

Answer 6

Actually create-session="never" doesn't mean being completely stateless. There's an issue for that in Spring Security issue management.