Custom AuthenticationProvider is not called

Question

I want to have a basic auth-protected REST app. I followed the general instructions from http://www.baeldung.com/spring-security-authentication-provider in order to get the security working.

I ended up creating my implementation of AuthenticationProvider, but it never gets called by Spring. All requests end up with an error:

{"timestamp":1460199213227,"status":401,"error":"Unauthorized","message":"Full authentication is required to access this resource","path":"/test"}

without the AuthenticationProvider ever doing anything.

The app is annotation-based and here are the relevant bits:

Security setup

@Configuration
@Order(SecurityProperties.ACCESS_OVERRIDE_ORDER)
public class ApplicationSecurity extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {
    @Autowired
    CustomAuthenticationProvider authenticationProvider;

    @Override
    protected void configure(AuthenticationManagerBuilder auth) throws Exception {
        auth.authenticationProvider(authenticationProvider);
    }

    @Override
    public void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
        http
                .csrf().disable()
                .authenticationProvider(authenticationProvider)
                .authorizeRequests()
                .anyRequest().authenticated().and().httpBasic();
    }
}

AuthenticationProvider

@Component
public class CustomAuthenticationProvider implements AuthenticationProvider {
    @Autowired
    private UserDAO userDAO;
    @Autowired
    private Authenticator authenticator;

    @Override
    public Authentication authenticate(Authentication authentication) throws AuthenticationException {
        // This never gets called, I checked with debugger
        String username = authentication.getName();
        String password = authentication.getCredentials().toString();

        User user = userDAO.findByUsername(username);
        User authenticatedUser = authenticator.authenticate(user, password);
        if (authenticatedUser == null){
            throw new RESTAuthenticationException("Auth failed");
        }

        List<GrantedAuthority> authorityList = new ArrayList<>();
        return new UsernamePasswordAuthenticationToken(user, authorityList);
    }

    @Override
    public boolean supports(Class<?> aClass) {
        return aClass.equals(UsernamePasswordAuthenticationToken.class);
    }
}

Controller

@RestController
public class UserController {
    @RequestMapping(value = "/test")
    public ResponseEntity test(@AuthenticationPrincipal User user) {
        return ResponseEntity.ok().body(user);
    }
}

Answer 1

You receive a response with status code 401. This is the "unauthorized" http status code. It is probably caused by a missing/malformed Authorization header in your request.

You are using Http-Basic: it requires the following header in the request :

Authorization: Basic QWxhZGRpbjpPcGVuU2VzYW1l

where the string QWxhZGRpbjpPcGVuU2VzYW1l is the string <user>:<password> base64 encoded.