Grails applications with CAS enabled - authentication

Fellow grails developers, help me to find out the most groovy way to accomplish following.
So, I have a Tomcat with enabled CAS, which is used by all webapps hosted.
One of these webapps is grails application.
As for files in web-app folder of this grails application, they just can see request.getRemoteUser() as expected.
As for the grails-app (to get user name in controllers, for example), as far as I can understand, I should take some additional steps.
My question is - what is the most groovy way to accomplish this?
Off the top of my head, just trying to resolve this issue by any means, I can forward requests to controllers from web-app part, but it quiet perversive. Or I can install grails CAS plugin, but that means I'm just doubling configs, since I already head configure web.xml.
Or I can (can I?) use somehow for these purposes springSecurityService?
But what is the most elegant way to get user name in grails application when, as for web applications, there is already working CAS?

There's a few different ways to handle this:
Use spring-security-core with spring-security-cas; but like you say, this adds a second CAS layer
Access user information through request.remoteUser, as in any other webapp
configure a PreAuthenticatedAuthenticationProvider and a RequestHeaderAuthenticationFilter to get spring-security to trust the request headers set up tomcat; there's some information on setting this up at http://dickersonshypotheticalblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/grails-spring-security-using.html

Related

How to make simple JAAS login module work (EJBs, Tomcat, WebLogic)?

I want to create a simple login module which authenticates users so they can, through a servlet using the weblogic client, access EJB's methods annotated with #RolesAllowed. As you probably noted, I have two seperate tiers - one with a webapp (Tomcat) and one containing business logic (WebLogic).
Generally speaking, I followed this JAAS tutorial (setting things accordingly).
According to the answer to this question, the principals should be propaged to the business tier (even having the tiers on separate machines?)
However, what I'm getting is an error page with following header: HTTP Status 500 - [EJB:010160]Security violation: User <anonymous> has insufficient permission to access EJB type=<ejb>
Also, I created corresponding roles in the WebLogic console.
Some tests from the servlet's GET method (without calling Bean's annotaed method):
request.getUserPrincipal().getName(): ADMIN
request.getParameter("role"): null
request.isUserInRole("admins"): true
(request is obtained from the argument #Context HttpServletRequest request)
Is there any additional thing to do to make it work? Or is it sufficient but there may be an error somewhere?
Let me also point I'm quite new in creating Java EE applications.
Help appreciated
The integration of security information between a servlet container and an EJB container is vendor specific. The question that you cited refers to remote calls between containers from the same vendor.
In your case, you have two different vendors - Apache Tomcat and Oracle WebLogic. Therefore, you are going to have more work to do.
You don't state which version of WebLogic that you're using, however the article Using JAAS Authentication in Java Clients describes the additional steps that you need to do in order to correctly propogate the security context from Tomcat to WebLogic 11g. You will likely be able to find similar information for other WebLogic versions.

OneDrive OAuth with Multiple Domains

we are working on integrating OneDrive into our service. There is one issue we are facing with the OAuth redirects.
We have multiple deployment stages in our development process which include different base-urls. Starting with local development, multiple test deployments and one production. Is there any way to use different base urls for allowed redirect urls? Will this ever be supported? Why is it not? Dropbox and GDrive both support this.
My only idea would be to use different apps for the different stages which would introduce some complexity I would like to avoid.
What is the best process of handling different urls in development and production?
I found Consuming onedrive rest api in development environment using localhost which is not something I want to do since it will create confusion at some point if you forget to change your hosts file back.
Regards,
arne
Daron from OneDrive here. Unfortunately that's not supported right now, so your best bet is to register different apps for your different stages. We've noted your feedback though.

securing SPA multi-tenant SaaS application

I need some help with securing a single page multi-tenant saas application.
Questions:
1) What is the best way to implement it? I am trying the build the application using angularjs, spring mvc and REST.
2) Can this be done using Spring Security? Any example with creating login page and securing REST, calls will be helpful?
I have found a sample for implementing spring security with Spring JPA (http://krams915.blogspot.com/2012/01/spring-security-31-implement_3065.html) but it is not for SPA and SaaS.
I understand this a very broad question but i am new to SPA, REST and SaaS so any pointers will be helpful.
Thanks...
I have already participated in two projects with SPA and security aspects. Last of them was GWT + Spring Security. I am sure that you can use successfully Angular and Spring Security together.
Unfortunately there is no built-in config parameter 'we are in SPA mode' in Spring Security AFAIK. So some tweaking / conf from Spring Security side will be necessary. Example:
imagine that during login you call built-in into Spring Security login controller. In a case of successfull authentication by default user will be redirected to index page, where in a case of failure it will be redirected to corresponding error page. It is a normal behavior for standard web applications that will be not so useful for SPA web applications. In a case of SPA you need to detect AJAX call and print JSON with username / roles for successfull cases or send 401 code for failures (then detect 401 in JS and show corresponding error). You can use corresponding extention points from Spring Security to do so: AuthenticationSuccessHandler and AuthenticationFailureHandler.
Some another thing to tweak: by default after session expiration user will be redirected to login page (and SPA app receive login page as a response to the next AJAX call).
Looking into my personal exprience general guide will be like so: after login load list of roles into JS. Use it to show / hide corresponding components on UI side. Apply the same list of restrictions on server side too. To make sure that user do not edit JS in browser (although in a case of minified JS of some medium size app it will very complex task). On the server side you must choose between:
Secure URLs of AJAX calls
Secure some Java methods.
I prefer second one (secure business methods on services). I think it is more convinient because normally we want secure business operations, not some endpoints. As adwantage you will be able expose your business logic via some other protocol, and security will be there already. From other side I can imagine some business requirement to have different permissions for different endpoints / protocols. So it depends more on your actual situation.
Lage size JS applications must be splitted into modules. To decrease direct dependencies it may be better to use events insted of direct calls to cummunicate between modules. There are interesting thoughts of Addy Osmany about how to do security in these coditions. I did not found good link to it, maybe this or this will be helpfull (search "permission").
Feel free to post any questions. Good luck.

Does JBoss have a user management API which I can use?

I am going to run a Web App on JBoss App Server 7. Does JBoss have some sort of inbuilt user management module/API which I can use rather than code my own? Or do I have to make this module myself. I know about the default JAAS pieces providing authentication AND authorisation, however I am looking to manage, add, edit, delete users from the datasource as well.
I'm not being lazy or anything, just want to know if JBoss has an easy inbuilt way before I start :)
Google implies no so I want to make sure by asking here.
As far as I know they don't provide any easy to managed identity provider, they "only" provide way to connect to identity provider using standard protocol like LDAP, SAML and WS-trust, openid to provide container managed authentication.
They have a idm project but it seems to provide standard protocol SSO identity backed by some identity store but doesn't provide way to manage the users.
PicketBox and PricketLink are the tow JBoss project you should look for more information.
These element can be used if you want to use global identity system, existing one, new product deployment or custom build.
(disclaimer: I have sped some time on Picket* projects documentation and I still don't think I get a good knowledge on how it works... )
There is a web interface and a command line interface for management operations. See the Management Clients section of the documentation.
The security realms could be what you're after. I'm not really a security expert though.
Maybe a security domain could be helpful too.

Modifying html repsonse from a webserver before it reaches the browser using a webserver plugin?

The question is as simple as the title. I have a webapp (I have no clue as to what technology it was built on or what appserver it is running on). However, I do know that this webapp is being served by an Apache Server/ IIS Server / IBM Http Server. Now, I would like to have a plugin/ module / add-on at the web-server end, which would parse/truncate/cut/regex the http response (based on the requested url's pattern), and mask(encrypt/shuffle/substitute) a set of fields in this response based on different parameters(user's LDAP permissions in the intranet / user's geo-location if on the internet, etc) and send the altered response back to the user.
So, Is there an easy answer to creating such plugins/modules/add-ons? How feasible is this approach of creating extra software at the webserver, when you want to mask sensitive information in a webapp without modfying the web-app code? Are there any tools that help you do this for Apache?
And, finally, is this just a really crazy thing to try?!
Each webserver will have its own way of doing so.
There is no universal plugin architecture for webservers.
In IIS you would write an HTTP Handler or HTTP Module, or possibly an ISAPI Filter. You can also directly interact with the http response using the Response object exposed by the HttpContext.
With apache, there are different modules that can do what you want (mod_headers, for example).
I don't know anything about WebSphere, but I am certain it also has similar mechanisms.
What you are asking is required by most web applications, so would be either built in or very easy to do.
The easiest way is to add a plug-in using the web application container. For example, if it's Tomcat, you can add a filter or valve.
If you want to plug-in to the web server, you'd need to write a custom module using the API of whichever web server is being used.
If all else fails, you could always wrap the entire server in a reverse proxy. All requests would go through your proxy and that would give you the opportunity to modify the requests and the responses.