spring security - Handling both form and HTTP basic authentication with different sources

Question

I already have form login and Basic auth working side by side with the help of a DelegatingAuthenticationEntryPoint.

What I'm trying to do is have users coming thru the login form to be authenticated against criteria "A", and have users coming thru the Basic auth requests to be authenticated against criteria "B".

Some of the application's resources are exposed thru a RESTful service (accessible via Basic auth). Instead of having users enter their own credentials to make a REST service call, they can enter generated key/value pairs for use exclusively with the REST service that can later be revoked by the user or by the app administrator.

I would prefer to share as much of my security-specific beans as possible between the two methods of authentication. I know I will need separate UserDetailsServices as the form login queries my users table, and Basic auth will query my service_credentials table.

What is the correct way to achieve this kind of configuration in Spring Security?

Answer 1

Depending on your app and whether you're using Spring Security 3.1, you might be best to split the configuration into multiple filter chains, each with a separate authentication manager defined:

<http pattern="/rest_api/**" create-session="stateless"
    authentication-manager-ref="serviceCredsAuthMgr">
    <http-basic />
</http>

<http authentication-manager-ref="mainAuthMgr">
    <form-login />
</http>

<authentication-manager id="serviceCredsAuthMgr">
    <authentication-provider user-service-ref="serviceCredsUserDetailsSvc" />
</authentication-manager>

<authentication-manager id="mainAuthMgr">
    <!-- whatever -->
</authentication-manager>

Instead of the pattern attribute you can also use the request-matcher-ref attribute to specify a RequestMatcher instance which will be used to map incoming requests to a particular filter chain. This has a very simple interface, but can allow you to match based on something other than the URL path, such as the Accept header.