Spring Boot Basic Authentication without Session (Stateless Session)

Question

I have configured Basic Authentication my Spring-Boot application. Everything is Java Config, no xml.

import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
import org.springframework.security.config.annotation.authentication.builders.AuthenticationManagerBuilder;
import org.springframework.security.config.annotation.web.builders.HttpSecurity;
import org.springframework.security.config.annotation.web.configuration.EnableWebSecurity;
import org.springframework.security.config.annotation.web.configuration.WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter;

@Configuration
@EnableWebSecurity
public class SecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {

    @Override
    protected void configure(AuthenticationManagerBuilder auth) throws Exception {
        // Authenticate username -> admin, password -> admin & set role as "ROLE_USER"
        auth.inMemoryAuthentication().withUser("admin").password("admin").roles("USER");
    }

    @Override
    protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {

        http.authorizeRequests()
            .antMatchers("/login").permitAll()
            // All Requests should be Authenticated
            .anyRequest().authenticated()
            .and()
            // Enable Basic Authentication
            .httpBasic()
            .and()
            .formLogin()
                .loginPage("/login")
                .defaultSuccessUrl("/main", true)
                .loginProcessingUrl("/session")
                .usernameParameter("Username").passwordParameter("Password")
            .and()
            .logout().logoutUrl("/logout").permitAll()
            .and().csrf().disable();
    }

}

It's configured for both Basic authentication and normal form login. When I tested the basic authentication from Rest-Client on Firefox, I can access the secure url "/main". But in the response headers, I'm getting Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=301225C7AE7C74B0892887389996785D;.

I don't want cookies to be generated for basic authentication. I want true Stateless session for Basic Authentication. Do note that I need cookies to be generated for form-login to work, so disabling cookies is not an option. I know about the create-session="stateless" in xml configuration, but is there any way to do the same in Java config so that Basic Authentication is Stateless and Form-Authentication is Statefull..?

Answer 1

For anyone else that comes across this, here's something else to check.

I was hitting this same problem with Spring Boot and even with

   sessionManagement().sessionCreationPolicy(SessionCreationPolicy.STATELESS)

I was still seeing JSESSIONID cookies being set. In my case (using JWT), the missing piece seemed to be setting setAllowSessionCreation on the HttpSessionSecurityContextRepository object, like this:

    public class StatelessAuthenticationFilter extends GenericFilterBean {
        private final MyTokenAuthService authenticationService;
        private SecurityContextRepository repository = new HttpSessionSecurityContextRepository();
        protected final Logger logger = LoggerFactory.getLogger(getClass().getName());

        public StatelessAuthenticationFilter(MyTokenAuthService authenticationService) {
            this.authenticationService = authenticationService;
            ((HttpSessionSecurityContextRepository) repository).setAllowSessionCreation(false);
        }
     }

What pointed me this were these lines in HttpSessionSecurityContextRepository:

private boolean allowSessionCreation = true;