How do I remove the ROLE_ prefix from Spring Security with JavaConfig?

Question

I'm trying to remove the "ROLE_" prefix in Spring Security. The first thing I tried was:

http.servletApi().rolePrefix("");

That didn't work, so I tried creating a BeanPostProcessor as suggested in http://docs.spring.io/spring-security/site/migrate/current/3-to-4/html5/migrate-3-to-4-jc.html#m3to4-role-prefixing-disable. That didn't work either.

Finally, I tried creating my own SecurityExpressionHandler:

  @Override
  protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
      http
          .authorizeRequests()
          .expressionHandler(webExpressionHandler())
          .antMatchers("/restricted").fullyAuthenticated()
          .antMatchers("/foo").hasRole("mycustomrolename")
          .antMatchers("/**").permitAll();
  }

  private SecurityExpressionHandler<FilterInvocation> webExpressionHandler() {
      DefaultWebSecurityExpressionHandler defaultWebSecurityExpressionHandler = new DefaultWebSecurityExpressionHandler();
      defaultWebSecurityExpressionHandler.setDefaultRolePrefix("");
      return defaultWebSecurityExpressionHandler;
  }

However, this doesn't work either. If I use "hasAuthority(roleName)" instead of hasRole, it works as expected.

Is it possible to remove the ROLE_ prefix from Spring Security's hasRole check?

Answer 1

Starting from Spring 4.2, you can define the prefix with a single bean, as described here: https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-security/issues/4134

@Bean
GrantedAuthorityDefaults grantedAuthorityDefaults() {
    return new GrantedAuthorityDefaults(""); // Remove the ROLE_ prefix
}

XML version:

<beans:bean id="grantedAuthorityDefaults" class="org.springframework.security.config.core.GrantedAuthorityDefaults">
    <beans:constructor-arg value="" />
</beans:bean>