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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<chapter xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook" version="5.0" xml:id="el-access"
xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">
<title>Expression-Based Access Control</title>
<para> Spring Security 3.0 introduced the ability to use Spring EL expressions as an
authorization mechanism in addition to the simple use of configuration attributes and
access-decision voters which have seen before. Expression-based access control is built on
the same architecture but allows complicated boolean logic to be encapsulated in a single
expression.</para>
<section>
<title>Overview</title>
<para>Spring Security uses Spring EL for expression support and you should look at how that
works if you are interested in understanding the topic in more depth. Expressions are
evaluated with a <quote>root object</quote> as part of the evaluation context. Spring
Security uses specific classes for web and method security as the root object, in order
to provide built-in expressions and access to values such as the current
principal.</para>
<section xml:id="el-common-built-in">
<title>Common Built-In Expressions</title>
<para>The base class for expression root objects is
<classname>SecurityExpressionRoot</classname>. This provides some common
expressions which are available in both web and method security.</para>
<table frame="none">
<title>Common built-in expressions</title>
<tgroup cols="2">
<colspec colname="c1" colnum="1" colwidth="1.0*"/>
<colspec colname="c2" colnum="2" colwidth="2.0*"/>
<thead>
<row>
<entry>Expression</entry>
<entry>Description</entry>
</row>
</thead>
<tbody>
<row>
<entry><literal>hasRole([role])</literal></entry>
<entry>Returns <literal>true</literal> if the current principal has the
specified role.</entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry><literal>hasAnyRole([role1,role2])</literal></entry>
<entry>Returns <literal>true</literal> if the current principal has any
of the supplied roles (given as a comma-separated list of
strings)</entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry><literal>principal</literal></entry>
<entry>Allows direct access to the principal object representing the
current user</entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry><literal>authentication</literal></entry>
<entry>Allows direct access to the current
<interfacename>Authentication</interfacename> object obtained
from the <interfacename>SecurityContext</interfacename></entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry><literal>permitAll</literal></entry>
<entry>Always evaluates to <literal>true</literal></entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry><literal>denyAll</literal></entry>
<entry>Always evaluates to <literal>false</literal></entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry><literal>isAnonymous()</literal></entry>
<entry>Returns <literal>true</literal> if the current principal is an
anonymous user</entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry><literal>isRememberMe()</literal></entry>
<entry>Returns <literal>true</literal> if the current principal is a
remember-me user</entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry><literal>isAuthenticated()</literal></entry>
<entry>Returns <literal>true</literal> if the user is not
anonymous</entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry><literal>isFullyAuthenticated()</literal></entry>
<entry>Returns <literal>true</literal> if the user is not an anonymous
or a remember-me user</entry>
</row>
</tbody>
</tgroup>
</table>
</section>
</section>
<section xml:id="el-access-web">
<title>Web Security Expressions</title>
<para> To use expressions to secure individual URLs, you would first need to set the
<literal>use-expressions</literal> attribute in the <literal>&lt;http></literal>
element to <literal>true</literal>. Spring Security will then expect the
<literal>access</literal> attributes of the <literal>&lt;intercept-url></literal>
elements to contain Spring EL expressions. The expressions should evaluate to a boolean,
defining whether access should be allowed or not. For example:<programlisting><![CDATA[
<http use-expressions="true">
<intercept-url pattern="/admin*"
access="hasRole('admin') and hasIpAddress('192.168.1.0/24')"/>
...
</http>
]]></programlisting>Here we have defined that the <quote>admin</quote> area of an application
(defined by the URL pattern) should only be available to users who have the granted
authority <quote>admin</quote> and whose IP address matches a local subnet. We've
already seen the built-in <literal>hasRole</literal> expression in the previous section.
The expression <literal>hasIpAddress</literal> is an additional built-in expression
which is specific to web security. It is defined by the
<classname>WebSecurityExpressionRoot</classname> class, an instance of which is used
as the expression root object when evaluation web-access expressions. This object also
directly exposed the <interfacename>HttpServletRequest</interfacename> object under the
name <literal>request</literal> so you can invoke the request directly in an
expression.</para>
<para>If expressions are being used, a <classname>WebExpressionVoter</classname> will be
added to the <interfacename>AccessDecisionManager</interfacename> which is used by the
namespace. So if you aren't using the namespace and want to use expressions, you will
have to add one of these to your configuration.</para>
</section>
<section>
<title>Method Security Expressions</title>
<para>Method security is a bit more complicated than a simple allow or deny rule. Spring
Security 3.0 introduced some new annotations in order to allow comprehensive support for
the use of expressions.</para>
<section xml:id="el-pre-post-annotations">
<title><literal>@Pre</literal> and <literal>@Post</literal> Annotations</title>
<para>There are four annotations which support expression attributes to allow pre and
post-invocation authorization checks and also to support filtering of submitted
collection arguments or return values. They are <literal>@PreAuthorize</literal>,
<literal>@PreFilter</literal>, <literal>@PostAuthorize</literal> and
<literal>@PostFilter</literal>. Their use is enabled through the
<literal>global-method-security</literal> namespace
element:<programlisting><![CDATA[<global-method-security pre-post-annotations="enabled"/>]]></programlisting></para>
<section>
<title>Access Control using <literal>@PreAuthorize</literal> and
<literal>@PostAuthorize</literal></title>
<para>The most obviously useful annotation is <literal>@PreAuthorize</literal> which
decides whether a method can actually be invoked or not. For example (from the
<quote>Contacts</quote> sample
application)<programlisting> @PreAuthorize("hasRole('ROLE_USER')")
public void create(Contact contact);</programlisting>which
means that access will only be allowed for users with the role "ROLE_USER".
Obviously the same thing could easily be achieved using a traditional
configuration and a simple configuration attribute for the required role. But
what
about:<programlisting> @PreAuthorize("hasPermission(#contact, 'admin')")
public void deletePermission(Contact contact, Sid recipient, Permission permission);</programlisting>Here
we're actually using a method argument as part of the expression to decide
whether the current user has the <quote>admin</quote>permission for the given
contact. The built-in <literal>hasPermission()</literal> expression is linked
into the Spring Security ACL module through the application context, as we'll
<link xlink:href="#el-permission-evaluator">see below</link>. You can access
any of the method arguments by name as expression variables, provided your code
has debug information compiled in. Any Spring-EL functionality is available
within the expression, so you can also access properties on the arguments. For
example, if you wanted a particular method to only allow access to a user whose
username matched that of the contact, you could write</para>
<programlisting>
@PreAuthorize("#contact.name == authentication.name")
public void doSomething(Contact contact);</programlisting>
<para>Here we are accessing another builtin expression, <literal>authentication</literal>,
which is the <interfacename>Authentication</interfacename> stored in the
security context. You can also access its <quote>principal</quote> property
directly, using the expression <literal>principal</literal>. The value will
often be a <interfacename>UserDetails</interfacename> instance, so you might use an
expression like <literal>principal.username</literal> or
<literal>principal.enabled</literal>.</para>
<para>Less commonly, you may wish to perform an access-control check after the
method has been invoked. This can be achieved using the
<literal>@PostAuthorize</literal> annotation. To access the return value
from a method, use the builtin name <literal>returnObject</literal> in the
expression.</para>
</section>
<section>
<title>Filtering using <literal>@PreFilter</literal> and
<literal>@PostFilter</literal></title>
<para>As you may already be aware, Spring Security supports filtering of collections
and arrays and this can now be achieved using expressions. This is most commonly
performed on the return value of a method. For
example:<programlisting> @PreAuthorize("hasRole('ROLE_USER')")
@PostFilter("hasPermission(filterObject, 'read') or hasPermission(filterObject, 'admin')")
public List&lt;Contact> getAll();</programlisting>When
using the <literal>@PostFilter</literal> annotation, Spring Security iterates
through the returned collection and removes any elements for which the supplied
expression is false. The name <literal>filterObject</literal> refers to the
current object in the collection. You can also filter before the method call,
using <literal>@PreFilter</literal>, though this is a less common requirement.
The syntax is just the same, but if there is more than one argument which is a
collection type then you have to select one by name using the
<literal>filterTarget</literal> property of this annotation.</para>
<para>Note that filtering is obviously not a substitute for tuning your data
retrieval queries. If you are filtering large collections and removing many of
the entries then this is likely to be inefficient.</para>
</section>
</section>
<section xml:id="el-method-built-in">
<title>Built-In Expressions</title>
<para>There are some built-in expressions which are specific to method security, which
we have already seen in use above. The <literal>filterTarget</literal> and
<literal>returnValue</literal> values are simple enough, but the use of the
<literal>hasPermission()</literal> expression warrants a closer look.</para>
<section xml:id="el-permission-evaluator">
<title>The <interfacename>PermissionEvaluator</interfacename> interface</title>
<para><literal>hasPermission()</literal> expressions are delegated to an instance of
<interfacename>PermissionEvaluator</interfacename>. It is intended to bridge
between the expression system and Spring Security's ACL system, allowing you to
specify authorization constraints on domain objects, based on abstract
permissions. It has no explicit dependencies on the ACL module, so you could
swap that out for an alternative implementation if required. The interface has
two methods:
<programlisting language="java"> boolean hasPermission(Authentication authentication, Object targetDomainObject, Object permission);
boolean hasPermission(Authentication authentication, Serializable targetId, String targetType, Object permission);</programlisting>which
map directly to the available versions of the expression, with the exception
that the first argument (the <interfacename>Authentication</interfacename>
object) is not supplied. The first is used in situations where the domain
object, to which access is being controlled, is already loaded. Then expression
will return true if the current user has the given permission for that object.
The second version is used in cases where the object is not loaded, but its
identifier is known. An abstract <quote>type</quote> specifier for the domain
object is also required, allowing the correct ACL permissions to be loaded. This
has traditionally been the Java class of the object, but does not have to be as
long as it is consistent with how the permissions are loaded.</para>
<para>To use <literal>hasPermission()</literal> expressions, you have to explicitly
configure a <interfacename>PermissionEvaluator</interfacename> in your
application context. This would look something like this:<programlisting language="xml"> <![CDATA[ <security:global-method-security pre-post-annotations="enabled">
<security:expression-handler ref="expressionHandler"/>
</security:global-method-security>
<bean id="expressionHandler"
class="org.springframework.security.access.expression.method.DefaultMethodSecurityExpressionHandler">
<property name="permissionEvaluator" ref="myPermissionEvaluator"/>
</bean>]]></programlisting>Where <literal>myPermissionEvaluator</literal> is the bean which
implements <interfacename>PermissionEvaluator</interfacename>. Usually this will
be the implementation from the ACL module which is called
<classname>AclPermissionEvaluator</classname>. See the
<quote>Contacts</quote> sample application configuration for more
details.</para>
</section>
</section>
</section>
</chapter>