Why use Spring Security??

Spring Security is a very smart solution for the entire authentication based needs, it could be file based authentication, LDAP or Database authentication. The framework takes the responsibility to help with security concerns making it very easy and reliable solution for the user.  Spring Security also allow role based access i.e. it distinguishes user X and user Y flawlessly and allows  user to do the task that are privileged to them. Spring Security can also have the access controlled views by saying we mean that the framework controls the rendering of view user X and user Y can have two different views.

The tutorial demonstrates the minimal configuration for embedding spring security in any existing project in two minutes. To begin with the tutorial let us assume that one has spring project already prepared and only need is to add the spring security.

Pre-requisites:

1)      Eclipse/STS

2)      Spring MVC project

3)      Maven

4)      Java JDK 1.6

To add up the security component follow the following steps:

1)Change in pom.xml

Add the following spring configuration in pom.xml

org.springframework.security
spring-security-core
${org.springframework-version}



org.springframework.security
spring-security-web
${org.springframework-version}



org.springframework.security
spring-security-config
${org.springframework-version}

The org.springframework-version is already defined in pom.xml, please check the notation

2) Add spring-security.xml

Create a new xml file in directory of WEB-INF which goes like following,

The intercept-url defines a pattern which will be allowed for the authentication, in this case
every URL is secured, if you wish for some specific URL’s that too can be defined here using
correct pattern.

The ROLE_USER has been assigned with the username and password.

3) Edit web.xml

Add the spring security filter in web.xml which goes like:

springSecurityFilterChain
org.springframework.web.filter.DelegatingFilterProxy



springSecurityFilterChain
/*

Also add the spring-security file in the context param:

contextConfigLocation
/WEB-INF/spring/root-context.xml
/WEB-INF/spring-security.xml

Take care that no comma is there in between the entries of XML’s.

4) The project is ready with Spring Security Configuration

Build the project and install in your webapp directory.

Web Directory structure looks like:

On hitting any URL you must see the default login page with username and password fields.

Once you fill the correct credentials you can move to your normal webapp flow.

We have achieved the basic authentication of the webapp using Spring Security, now the user needs to
fill the credentials to access any URL. In the next part we will be discussing about securing the password,session management, assigning different roles to different flows of webapp with different views.

Hope the article helped in basic integration, suggestion and feedbacks are welcome

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