Spring – security context management

Once the Authentication Filter intercept the authentication request, the details about the user that has been authenticated are stored in the security context.

The security context represent the instance storing the Authentication Object, that is been later accessed by the Controllers.

The context is managed by a SecurityContextHolder, with one of the following three strategies:

  • MODE_THREADLOCAL – each request has its on thread (own sec. context)
  • MODE_INHERITABLETHREADLOCAL – security context copied to next thread (@Async methods inheriting the context)
  • MODE_GLOBAL – same context for all the threads (not thread safe!)

You can get the authentication object from the SecurityContextHolder:

SecurityContext context = SecurityContextHolder.getContext();
  Authentication a = context.getAuthentication();

If you want to specify a different strategy than threadlocal, you have to set the strategy in the configuration, for example:

@Configuration
@EnableAsync
public class SecurityConfig{

//other lines of code

  @Bean
  public InitializingBean initializeSecurityContextHolder() {
    return () -> SecurityContextHolder.setStrategyName(
      SecurityContextHolder.MODE_INHERITABLETHREADLOCAL);
  }
}

If the new threads are not created by the Spring framework, you need to implement the security context propagation to the new thread on your own.

To solve the issue you can use a DelegatingSecurityContextRunnable or DelegatingSecurityContextCallable, if you need to return a value, to copy the context to the next thread “manually”.

Instead of simply using an ExecutorService, you can use its decorator provided by Spring security, called “DelegatingSecurityContextExecutorService “to propagate the thread:

@GetMapping("/hello")
public String hello() throws Exception {
  Callable<String> task = () -> {
    SecurityContext context = SecurityContextHolder.getContext();
    return context.getAuthentication().getName();
  };

  ExecutorService e = Executors.newCachedThreadPool();
  e = new DelegatingSecurityContextExecutorService(e);
  try {
    return "HEllo, " + e.submit(task).get() + "!";
  } finally {
    e.shutdown();
  }
}

Spring security – Password encoding delegation

The AuthenticatioProvider, that implements the authentication logic, requires a Password Encoder bean to validate the password propertly.

PasswordEncoder is the contract (interface) provided by Spring for this purpose.

You can treat passwords as plain text with NoOpPasswordEncoder, or choose an algorithm (like BCrypt, Argon2, etc-). Of course you do want make harder to read and steal passwords, so you need a definitely need the encoding!

If you want to allow to use different kinds of encoding algorithms , you can use the DelegatingPasswordEcoder.

The PasswordEncoderFactories method called “createDelegatingPasswordEncoder” will help you keeping your bean configuration more generic, by providing a Map of all the encoders:

@Bean
PasswordEncoder passwordEncoder(){
      return PasswordEncoderFactories.createDelegatingPasswordEncoder();
}

If you look into the factory method, you see that the default is Bcrypt, but you can use any other algorithm:

	public static PasswordEncoder createDelegatingPasswordEncoder() {
		String encodingId = "bcrypt";
		Map<String, PasswordEncoder> encoders = new HashMap<>();
		encoders.put(encodingId, new BCryptPasswordEncoder());
		encoders.put("ldap", new org.springframework.security.crypto.password.LdapShaPasswordEncoder());
		encoders.put("MD4", new org.springframework.security.crypto.password.Md4PasswordEncoder());
		encoders.put("MD5", new org.springframework.security.crypto.password.MessageDigestPasswordEncoder("MD5"));
		encoders.put("noop", org.springframework.security.crypto.password.NoOpPasswordEncoder.getInstance());
		encoders.put("pbkdf2", new Pbkdf2PasswordEncoder());
		encoders.put("scrypt", new SCryptPasswordEncoder());
		encoders.put("SHA-1", new org.springframework.security.crypto.password.MessageDigestPasswordEncoder("SHA-1"));
		encoders.put("SHA-256", new org.springframework.security.crypto.password.MessageDigestPasswordEncoder("SHA-256"));
		encoders.put("sha256", new org.springframework.security.crypto.password.StandardPasswordEncoder());
		encoders.put("argon2", new Argon2PasswordEncoder());

		return new DelegatingPasswordEncoder(encodingId, encoders);
	}

This will allow you to use several encoding algorithms:

    @Override
    protected void configure(AuthenticationManagerBuilder auth) throws Exception {
        auth.inMemoryAuthentication()
                .withUser("admin")
                .password("{bcrypt}$2a$10$7tYAvVL2/KwcQTcQywHIleKueg4ZK7y7d44hKyngjTwHCDlesxdla")
                .roles("ADMIN")
                .and()
                .withUser("laura")
                .password("{sha256}1296cefceb47413d3fb91ac7586a4625c33937b4d3109f5a4dd96c79c46193a029db713b96006ded")
                .roles("USER");
    }

In order to make the DelegatingPasswordEncoder recognize the algorithm (for example Bcrypt), you need to add a string like "{bcrypt}" as prefix, as you can see in the example above.

Spring – search through entities with ExampleMatchers

In the *.data.domain package in Spring you can find useful classes to search through the database (if you are using the JPA repository interface) rather quickly.

The Example and ExampleMatcher class will do the trick.

For example, if you’re looking for albums in a Table:

  public List<Album> search(AlbumSearchDTO search) {
      Album probe = new Album();
        if (StringUtils.hasText(search.value())) {
          probe.setTitle(search.value());
          probe.setArtist(search.value());
          probe.setDescription(search.value());
        }
        Example<Album> example = Example.of(probe, //
          ExampleMatcher.matchingAny() //
            .withIgnoreCase() //
            .withStringMatcher(StringMatcher.CONTAINING));
        return repository.findAll(example);
      }

You can pass the Example collection to a findAll method directly, and it will return a subset of rows containing the string …anywhere on the columns.

Check it out!

Spring Database Repository interfaces…

Spring offers you more than a way to get your database access operations easily ready out of the box.

You can find interfaces to extends to create your repository in two packages:

  • org.springframework.data.repository
  • org.springframework.data.jpa.repository

In the latter package you can the JPA specific extension of the Repository interface defined in org.springframework.data.repository:

https://docs.spring.io/spring-data/data-jpa/docs/current/api/org/springframework/data/jpa/repository/JpaRepository.html

You can simply create a Repository object as an interface, like:

public interface UserAccountRepository extends Repository<UserAccount,Long>{}

Or you can use a more specific one like:

CrudRepository<T,ID>Interface for generic CRUD operations on a repository for a specific type
ListCrudRepository<T,ID>Interface for generic CRUD operations on a repository for a specific type.
ListPagingAndSortingRepository<T,ID>Repository fragment to provide methods to retrieve entities using the pagination and sorting abstraction.
PagingAndSortingRepository<T,ID>Repository fragment to provide methods to retrieve entities using the pagination and sorting abstraction.
JpaRepository<T,ID>JPA specific extension of Repository.

You can extend one of them or more together according to your needs.

Tje JPARepository interface extends the CrudRepository and provides you with additional methods, like findAll, saveAndFlush, etc.

.

Spring Data – Optimistic locking with @Version

Spring Data provides pessimistic locking as default locking mechanism.

It means that the database record gets locked exclusively until the operation completes. This approach might be prone to deadlocks and requires a direct connection to the database to be used indipendently.

Optimistic locking comes in play if you have a high-volume system and you don’t want to mantain a database connection for the whole session. This way the client doesn’t maintain a lock and you can use a different connection from a connection pool from time to time, each time you access the resource.

Optimistic locking can be achieved with timestamps or versioning

If you want to use it with Spring, you can use the @Version annotation and add an additional attribute in your entity or base entity class, like:

@MappedSuperclass 

public abstract class Person{

@Version

private Long version;

//other attribututes, getters and setters

   public Long getVersion() {

      return version;

   }

//add setter

}

In the database table you also need to specify the version column:

ALTER TABLE person ADD COLUMN version int NOT NULL DEFAULT 0;

If you execute PUT requests / update the table row, a consistency (and isolation) check will tell you if you are working on the newest version.

If your request has an older version, you will get an error (probably a 500 – internal server one)

Spring Framework – Hot swapping!!!

I have already worked with Spring on a couple of projects and seen several tutorials online, but only one of them showed me how to reload the changes without stopping and restarting the application each time.

Well it´s supereasy. If you are using Maven, all you have to do is just adding the following dependency:

<dependency><dependency> 
         <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId> 
         <artifactId>spring-boot-devtools</artifactId> 
</dependency>

that´s it!

You can find more information at https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/2.3.3.RELEASE/reference/html/using-boot-devtools.html

 

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