Grails Spring Security using PreAuthenticated Authentication Provider

May 26, 2011 11:09 am

This was a tricky problem I've been trying to solve for a little while.

If your webserver is providing the authentication service then your application simply needs to read in the `remoteUser` value out of the request header and trust it. In Grails you can do this with the Spring Security Core plugin using a PreAuthenticatedAuthenticationProvider. But it requires some configuration.

Follow the regular Spring Security Core setup process with the following adjustments.

In Config.groovy, define the providers you want available:

grails.plugins.springsecurity.providerNames = ['preAuthenticatedAuthenticationProvider', 'anonymousAuthenticationProvider']


And we need to define that preAuthenticated provider as a bean.

In resources.groovy we need:

beans = {
userDetailsService(org.codehaus.groovy.grails.plugins.springsecurity.GormUserDetailsService) {
grailsApplication = ref('grailsApplication')
}

userDetailsByNameServiceWrapper(org.springframework.security.core.userdetails.UserDetailsByNameServiceWrapper) {
userDetailsService = ref('userDetailsService')
}

preAuthenticatedAuthenticationProvider(org.springframework.security.web.authentication.preauth.PreAuthenticatedAuthenticationProvider) {
preAuthenticatedUserDetailsService = userDetailsByNameServiceWrapper
}

requestHeaderAuthenticationFilter(org.springframework.security.web.authentication.preauth.RequestHeaderAuthenticationFilter) {
principalRequestHeader = 'remoteUser'
authenticationManager = ref('authenticationManager')
}
}


And finally, in our BootStrap.groovy file we need to register the authentication filter:

import org.codehaus.groovy.grails.plugins.springsecurity.SecurityFilterPosition
import org.codehaus.groovy.grails.plugins.springsecurity.SpringSecurityUtils

class BootStrap {
def init = { servletContext ->
SpringSecurityUtils.clientRegisterFilter('requestHeaderAuthenticationFilter', SecurityFilterPosition.PRE_AUTH_FILTER)
}
}

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *