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Spring Security 6.0 requires Spring 6.0 as a minimum and Spring 6.0 requires a minimum of Tomcat 10/Jetty 11 Closes gh-13565
75 lines
4.3 KiB
Plaintext
75 lines
4.3 KiB
Plaintext
[[servlet-x509]]
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= X.509 Authentication
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[[x509-overview]]
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The most common use of X.509 certificate authentication is in verifying the identity of a server when using SSL, most commonly when using HTTPS from a browser.
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The browser automatically checks that the certificate presented by a server has been issued (digitally signed) by one of a list of trusted certificate authorities that it maintains.
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You can also use SSL with "`mutual authentication`". The server then requests a valid certificate from the client as part of the SSL handshake.
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The server authenticates the client by checking that its certificate is signed by an acceptable authority.
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If a valid certificate has been provided, it can be obtained through the servlet API in an application.
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The Spring Security X.509 module extracts the certificate by using a filter.
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It maps the certificate to an application user and loads that user's set of granted authorities for use with the standard Spring Security infrastructure.
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You can also use SSL with "`mutual authentication`". The server then requests a valid certificate from the client as part of the SSL handshake.
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The server authenticates the client by checking that its certificate is signed by an acceptable authority.
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For example, if you use Tomcat, you should read the https://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-10.1-doc/ssl-howto.html[Tomcat SSL instructions].
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You should get this working before trying it out with Spring Security.
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== Adding X.509 Authentication to Your Web Application
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Enabling X.509 client authentication is very straightforward.
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To do so, add the `<x509/>` element to your http security namespace configuration:
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[source,xml]
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----
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<http>
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...
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<x509 subject-principal-regex="CN=(.*?)," user-service-ref="userService"/>;
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</http>
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----
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The element has two optional attributes:
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* `subject-principal-regex`.
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The regular expression used to extract a username from the certificate's subject name.
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The default value is shown in the preceding listing.
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This is the username that is passed to the `UserDetailsService` to load the authorities for the user.
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* `user-service-ref`.
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This is the bean ID of the `UserDetailsService` to be used with X.509.
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It is not needed if there is only one defined in your application context.
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The `subject-principal-regex` should contain a single group.
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For example, the default expression (`CN=(.*?)`) matches the common name field.
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So, if the subject name in the certificate is "CN=Jimi Hendrix, OU=...", this gives a user name of "Jimi Hendrix".
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The matches are case insensitive.
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So "emailAddress=(+.*?+)," matches "EMAILADDRESS=jimi@hendrix.org,CN=...", giving a user name "jimi@hendrix.org".
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If the client presents a certificate and a valid username is successfully extracted, there should be a valid `Authentication` object in the security context.
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If no certificate is found or no corresponding user could be found, the security context remains empty.
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This means that you can use X.509 authentication with other options, such as a form-based login.
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[[x509-ssl-config]]
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== Setting up SSL in Tomcat
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There are some pre-generated certificates in the {gh-samples-url}/servlet/java-configuration/authentication/x509/server[Spring Security Samples repository].
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You can use these to enable SSL for testing if you do not want to generate your own.
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The `server.jks` file contains the server certificate, the private key, and the issuing authority certificate.
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There are also some client certificate files for the users from the sample applications.
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You can install these in your browser to enable SSL client authentication.
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To run tomcat with SSL support, drop the `server.jks` file into the tomcat `conf` directory and add the following connector to the `server.xml` file:
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[source,xml]
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----
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<Connector port="8443" protocol="HTTP/1.1" SSLEnabled="true" scheme="https" secure="true"
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clientAuth="true" sslProtocol="TLS"
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keystoreFile="${catalina.home}/conf/server.jks"
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keystoreType="JKS" keystorePass="password"
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truststoreFile="${catalina.home}/conf/server.jks"
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truststoreType="JKS" truststorePass="password"
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/>
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----
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`clientAuth` can also be set to `want` if you still want SSL connections to succeed even if the client does not provide a certificate.
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Clients that do not present a certificate cannot access any objects secured by Spring Security unless you use a non-X.509 authentication mechanism, such as form authentication.
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