Getting a Post 403 Forbidden with Spring Boot (VueJS and Axios Frontend)

Question

I've been having an issue with CORS and I have tried everything I could find on Stack Overflow and basically anything that I found on Google and have had no luck.

So I have user authentication on my backend and I have a login page on my frontend. I hooked up the login page with Axios so I could make a post request and tried to login but I kept getting errors like "Preflight request" so I fixed that then I started getting the "Post 403 Forbidden" error.

It appeared like this:

POST http://localhost:8080/api/v1/login/ 403 (Forbidden)

Even trying to login using Postman doesn't work so something is clearly wrong. Will be posting class files below

On my backend, I have a class called WebSecurityConfig which deals with all the CORS stuff:

@Configuration
@EnableWebSecurity
@EnableGlobalMethodSecurity(prePostEnabled = true)
public class WebSecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {

    @Autowired
    private UserDetailsServiceImpl userDetailsService;

    @Bean
    public WebMvcConfigurer corsConfigurer() {
        return new WebMvcConfigurerAdapter() {
            @Override
            public void addCorsMappings(CorsRegistry registry) {
                registry.addMapping("/**")
                        .allowedMethods("GET", "POST", "HEAD", "PUT", "DELETE", "OPTIONS");
            }
        };
    }

    @Bean
    public CorsFilter corsFilter() {
        UrlBasedCorsConfigurationSource source = new UrlBasedCorsConfigurationSource();
        CorsConfiguration config = new CorsConfiguration();
        config.setAllowCredentials(true);
        config.addAllowedOrigin("*");  // TODO: lock down before deploying
        config.addAllowedHeader("*");
        config.addExposedHeader(HttpHeaders.AUTHORIZATION);
        config.addAllowedMethod("*");
        source.registerCorsConfiguration("/**", config);
        return new CorsFilter(source);
    }


    @Override
    protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
        http.headers().frameOptions().disable();
        http
                .cors()
                .and()
                .csrf().disable().authorizeRequests()
                .antMatchers("/").permitAll()
                .antMatchers("/h2/**").permitAll()
                .antMatchers(HttpMethod.POST, "/api/v1/login").permitAll()
                .anyRequest().authenticated()
                .and()
                // We filter the api/login requests
                .addFilterBefore(new JWTLoginFilter("/api/v1/login", authenticationManager()),
                        UsernamePasswordAuthenticationFilter.class);
        // And filter other requests to check the presence of JWT in header
        //.addFilterBefore(new JWTAuthenticationFilter(),
        //       UsernamePasswordAuthenticationFilter.class);
    }

    @Override
    protected void configure(AuthenticationManagerBuilder auth) throws Exception {
        // Create a default account
        auth.userDetailsService(userDetailsService);
//        auth.inMemoryAuthentication()
//                .withUser("admin")
//                .password("password")
//                .roles("ADMIN");
    }
}

On our frontend which is written in VueJS and using Axios to make the call

<script>
    import { mapActions } from 'vuex';
    import { required, username, minLength } from 'vuelidate/lib/validators';

    export default {
        data() {
            return {
                form: {
                    username: '',
                    password: ''
                },
                e1: true,
                response: ''
            }
        },
        validations: {
            form: {
                username: {
                    required
                },
                password: {
                    required
                }
            }
        },
        methods: {
            ...mapActions({
                setToken: 'setToken',
                setUser: 'setUser'
            }),
            login() {
                this.response = '';
                let req = {
                    "username": this.form.username,
                    "password": this.form.password
                };

                this.$http.post('/api/v1/login/', req)
                .then(response => {
                    if (response.status === 200) {
                        this.setToken(response.data.token);
                        this.setUser(response.data.user);

                        this.$router.push('/dashboard');
                    } else {
                        this.response = response.data.error.message;
                    }
                }, error => {
                    console.log(error);
                    this.response = 'Unable to connect to server.';
                });
            }
        }
    }
</script>

So when I debugged via Chrome's tools (Network), I noticed that the OPTIONS request goes through as shown below:

Here is a picture of the POST error:

Here is another class which handles the OPTIONS request (JWTLoginFilter as referenced in the WebSecurityConfig):

public class JWTLoginFilter extends AbstractAuthenticationProcessingFilter {

    public JWTLoginFilter(String url, AuthenticationManager authManager) {
        super(new AntPathRequestMatcher(url));
        setAuthenticationManager(authManager);

    }

    @Override
    public Authentication attemptAuthentication(
            HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResponse res)
            throws AuthenticationException, IOException, ServletException {
        AccountCredentials creds = new ObjectMapper()
                .readValue(req.getInputStream(), AccountCredentials.class);
        if (CorsUtils.isPreFlightRequest(req)) {
            res.setStatus(HttpServletResponse.SC_OK);
            return null;

        }
        return getAuthenticationManager().authenticate(
                new UsernamePasswordAuthenticationToken(
                        creds.getUsername(),
                        creds.getPassword(),
                        Collections.emptyList()

                )
        );
    }

    @Override
    protected void successfulAuthentication(
            HttpServletRequest req,
            HttpServletResponse res, FilterChain chain,
            Authentication auth) throws IOException, ServletException {
        TokenAuthenticationService
                .addAuthentication(res, auth.getName());
    }
}

Answer 1

When you configure Axios, you can simply specify the header once and for all:

import axios from "axios";

const CSRF_TOKEN = document.cookie.match(new RegExp(`XSRF-TOKEN=([^;]+)`))[1];
const instance = axios.create({
  headers: { "X-XSRF-TOKEN": CSRF_TOKEN }
});
export const AXIOS = instance;

Then (here I assume you use SpringBoot 2.0.0, while it should work also in SpringBoot 1.4.x onward) in your Spring Boot application you should add the following security configs.

@EnableWebSecurity
public class SecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {

    @Override
    protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
        http
            // CSRF Token
            .csrf()
                .csrfTokenRepository(CookieCsrfTokenRepository.withHttpOnlyFalse());
           // you can chain other configs here
    }

}

In this way, Spring will return the token as a cookie in the response (I assume you do a GET first) and you will read it in the AXIOS configuration file.