How to secure a Spring RESTful webservice for Angular.js or Ember.js

Question

I have a Spring MVC application that uses Spring Security to handle user login authentication, which works fine.

Now I want to add some Ember.js and Angular.js code to the HTML pages that accesses the Spring RESTful web services (which just return JSON data).

How do I bind the user login authentication to the authentication for the RESTful web services? In other words, I want to make it so that the RESTful web services can only be accessed once a user has logged in. That way, the Angular.js and Ember.js libraries can access these RESTful web services securely from my user pages only without anyone else being able to directly call them.

I read on one other post that Spring Security was never meant to be used with a full Ajax framework, is that true? I hope this is not the case. I'd imagine that this type of thing must be pretty common now as there are so many AJAX client side frameworks that work based off accessing a JSON/RESTful API.

Answer 1

It is certainly not true that Spring Security was never meant to be or cannot be used in AJAX applications. I have two applications in production that use Spring Security as well as AJAX and more applications under development with the same mix.

If you are going to use EmberJS or AngularJS in an existing web application with Spring Security working, you should not face too many problems if you simply add the JavaScript library to your project. This is because once your users are authenticated, any normal HTTP requests will be treated as authenticated as well because the browser will ensure that session information is passed back and forth using cookies or URL parameters, as appropriate. You can see one of my working examples on Github for Spring Security and EmberJS integration.

The only thing you may need to worry about is CSRF tokens for form submissions using AJAX. The latest Spring Security documentation has a small section dedicated to this so you should not face too many problems getting that to work either. However, I would like to clarify that this particular issue is not specific to Spring Security. CSRF protection typically involves including a secure, randomly generated token with every HTTP POST request. The challenge arises from making existing JavaScript libraries aware of this token and how it should be included in HTTP POST requests. This would be a challenge in any application, not just those using Spring Security.

If however you will work with stateless clients, such as, mobile devices, you will be unable to rely on the default Spring Security mechanism of storing the user credentials in HTTP Session because HTTP requests will not have information to tie them to a session. This again is not specific to a Spring or Spring Security application because the constraint is imposed by the nature of the client and the client-server communication rather than any server-side technology. In such circumstances you will need to pass some authentication token in the HTTP headers for the application to maintain security state on the server side. I have a working example for this as well. If you need more details, there are articles on the web that explain how to do something like this with Spring Security.