Developing a secure web application is a top priority for any organization. In this article, we'll look at how to use Spring Boot and Spring Security to create a simple and secure web application.
We'll first create a Spring Boot application with a basic security configuration. Then we'll add a few Spring Security features to secure our application.
We'll start by creating a Spring Boot application. Spring Boot makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring-based Applications that you can "just run".
We'll use the Spring Initializr to create our project. We'll select the following dependencies:
We'll name our project secure-web-app
.
Once the project is generated, we can import it into our favorite IDE and run it as a Spring Boot application.
Spring Security is a framework that provides authentication, authorization, and protection against common attacks.
By default, Spring Security is not configured. We can add a basic configuration by adding the following to our application.properties
file:
spring.security.user.name=user
spring.security.user.password=password
This will create a user with the username user
and password password
.
We can also add a more comprehensive configuration by creating a SecurityConfig.java
file.
@Configuration
@EnableWebSecurity
public class SecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {
@Override
protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
http
.authorizeRequests()
.anyRequest().authenticated()
.and()
.formLogin()
.and()
.httpBasic();
}
}
This will configure Spring Security to require authentication for all requests and to use form login and HTTP Basic authentication.
Now that we have a basic Spring Security configuration in place, we can add some additional features.
Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) is a type of attack that occurs when a malicious user tricks a victim into submitting a request to a web application that they are logged in to.
Spring Security provides CSRF protection by default. We can configure it by adding the following to our SecurityConfig.java
file:
@Configuration
@EnableWebSecurity
public class SecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {
@Override
protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
http
.csrf().disable()
...
}
}
This will disable CSRF protection.
We can also add security headers to our responses to help protect against common attacks.
We can add the following to our SecurityConfig.java
file:
@Configuration
@EnableWebSecurity
public class SecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {
@Override
protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
http
.headers()
.contentSecurityPolicy("script-src 'self'");
}
}
This will add the Content-Security-Policy
header to our responses.
We can also add the Strict-Transport-Security
header to enforce HTTPS:
@Configuration
@EnableWebSecurity
public class SecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {
@Override
protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
http
.requiresChannel()
.requestMatchers(r -> r.getHeader("X-Forwarded-Proto") != null)
.requiresSecure();
}
}
This will require HTTPS for all requests that contain the X-Forwarded-Proto
header.
Spring Security supports multiple authentication providers. We can add support for additional providers by overriding the configure(AuthenticationManagerBuilder)
method:
@Configuration
@EnableWebSecurity
public class SecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {
@Override
protected void configure(AuthenticationManagerBuilder auth) throws Exception {
auth
.inMemoryAuthentication()
.withUser("user").password("password").roles("USER");
}
...
}
This will configure an in-memory authentication provider with a single user.
We can also add support for JDBC-based authentication.
In this article, we've looked at how to use Spring Boot and Spring Security to create a simple and secure web application. We've also added some additional security features to help protect our application.