HTTPS login with Spring Security redirects to HTTP

Question

I have a Spring web app, secured with Spring Security, running on EC2. In front of the EC2 instance is an Elastic Load Balancer with an SSL cert (https terminates at the load balancer ie. port 443 -> port 80), so from Tomcat's perspective, inbound requests are HTTP.

My login form submits to https, however the subsequent redirect goes to http (success or fail). The authentication was successful, and I can go back to https and I'm logged in.

My login configuration looks like so:

<security:form-login
    default-target-url="/home"
    login-page="/"
    login-processing-url="/processlogin"
    authentication-failure-url="/?login_error=1"/>

What do I need to change to make default-target-url and authentication-failure-url go to https?

• Tomcat 6
• Spring Security 3.0.x

Answer 1

Your spring configuration should be agnostic to the used protocol. If you use something like "requires-channel", you'll run into problems sooner or later, especially if you want to deploy the same application to a development environment without https.

Instead, consider to configure your tomcat properly. You can do this with RemoteIpValve. Depending on which headers the loadbalancer sends, your server.xml configuration needs to contain something like this:

<Valve
   className="org.apache.catalina.valves.RemoteIpValve"
   internalProxies=".*"
   protocolHeader="X-Forwarded-Proto"
   httpsServerPort="443"
   />

Spring will determine the absolute redirect address based on the ServletRequest, so change the httpsServerPort if you are using something else than 443:

The httpsServerPort is the port returned by ServletRequest.getServerPort() when the protocolHeader indicates https protocol

Answer 2

If it is a Spring Boot application (I use currently the 2.0.0 release), the following configuration within the application.properties file should be enough:

server.tomcat.protocol-header=x-forwarded-proto

This worked for me on AWS with an load balancer at the front.

For Spring Boot < 2.0.0 it should also work (not tested)