Some important terms in Spring Security

Spring is the most famous Java Web framework today. It is used to build web applications through Java programming language. To use this framework, a strong background and understanding of Java is required.

Protecting our valuable data from unethical behavior is critical. In this article, we will introduce some important terms in Spring Security that help us protect user data. We won’t analyze any terminology in depth.

Terms related to Spring Security

Spring Security is an open source security framework that provides a comprehensive security solution for your Spring applications. It can be easily integrated with Spring and Spring Boot framework. It handles the main areas of application security such as authentication, authorization, CSRF, etc.

Let’s discuss some terms related to Spring Security -

Authentication

This is the process of checking or verifying the identity of the person interacting with the application. In order to utilize other services of the application, the user's identity must be verified, which is the most important step. One of the common ways to authenticate a user is to enter a username and password. Spring Security has its own set of authentication features that can be integrated with the following technologies -

• HTTP authentication.

• LDAP provides cross-platform authentication requirements.

• OpenID Authentication.

• Form-based authentication

• Automatic authentication, like "Remember Me", is a checkbox on the login form that prevents re-authentication for a certain period of time.

Spring Security has an excellent feature called in-memory authentication, which allows user data to be stored in application memory or RAM. We can authenticate without disturbing other databases. This saves us time and increases efficiency.

Authorization

After authenticating a user, the next step is to verify what actions a specific user is allowed to perform. This activity is called authorization. For example, a human resources management system has two types of users, one is employees and the other is administrators. There are some differences between employee and administrator permissions. Regular employees cannot add, update, or delete information of any kind, but administrators may have the authority to do so.

Let us understand in very simple words how authorization works in Spring Security. During the authentication process, a list of "GrantedAuthority" objects is created. These objects represent permissions granted to a user or system. These objects are then inserted into the "Authentication" object by the "AuthenticationManager". During the authorization decision process, the "GrantedAuthority" object is read by "AccessDecisionMangers".

Password encoding

Globally, most devices are hacked and phished due to weak passwords. Obviously, strengthening passwords is another topic. Here we will discuss the security measures taken by Spring Security.

Perhaps the most serious mistake is to store the user's password in clear text. Fortunately, Spring Security allows the use of various password encoder methods, such as MD5 and scrypt. By default, BCrypt is used to encrypt passwords. All these techniques are hashing algorithms and we don't need to develop them ourselves. They are written in the '' element.

The Chinese translation of

Principal

is:

Principal

This term has a special meaning in the Spring Security framework. It refers to the user, device, or any type of system that interacts with your application and performs any type of action.

filter

To apply its services, Spring Security uses a series of filters. Whenever there is a request from a client, it first goes through these filters and then executed. Some filter usages are discussed below −

• BasicAuthenticationFilter - This filter is responsible for basic authentication of the user.

• FormBasedAuthenticationFilter - It authenticates requests from form-based login technologies.

• CsrfFilter − It handles cross-site requests.

• CorsFilter − This filter handles cross-domain resource sharing.

in conclusion

The two main target areas of the Spring Security framework are authentication and authorization. In this article, we discuss the various techniques and methods used by Sprind Security to secure applications. Most features are fully customizable and can be configured according to our needs.

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