Spring Boot REST API/Spring Security: Return custom message when authentication fails

Question

I have a Spring Boot app using Jersey as the JAX-RS implementation. This is my security configuration:

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

    @Autowired TokenAuthenticationProvider tokenAuthenticationProvider;

    @Override
    public void configure(AuthenticationManagerBuilder auth) throws Exception {
        auth.authenticationProvider(tokenAuthenticationProvider);
    }

    @Override
    protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
        http.addFilterBefore(new AuthenticationTokenFilter(), BasicAuthenticationFilter.class)
                .csrf().disable()
                .authorizeRequests()
                .antMatchers("/dataHub/**")
                .authenticated();
    }
}

What I want to be able to do is to have a way to catch the Exceptions thrown by my TokenAuthenticationProvider and convert them into a standardized JSON format that we have agreed upon. Is there a way to do this? I tried messing around with adding a custom AuthenticationFailureHandler, but couldn't get that to work.

Answer 1

WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter appraoch

The HttpSecurity class has a method called exceptionHandling which can be used to override the default behavior. The following sample presents how the response message can be customized.

@Override
protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
    http
        // your custom configuration goes here
        .exceptionHandling()
        .authenticationEntryPoint((request, response, e) -> {
            String json = String.format("{\"message\": \"%s\"}", e.getMessage());
            response.setStatus(HttpServletResponse.SC_UNAUTHORIZED);
            response.setContentType("application/json");
            response.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");
            response.getWriter().write(json);                
        });
}

@ControllerAdvice appraoch - Why it doesn't work in this case

At first I thought about @ControllerAdvice that catches authentication exceptions for the entire application.

import org.springframework.http.HttpStatus;
import org.springframework.security.core.AuthenticationException;

@ControllerAdvice
public class AuthExceptionHandler {

    @ResponseStatus(HttpStatus.UNAUTHORIZED)
    @ExceptionHandler(AuthenticationException.class)
    @ResponseBody
    public String handleAuthenticationException(AuthenticationException e) {
        return String.format("{\"message\": \"%s\"}", e.getMessage());
    }

}

In the example above, the JSON is built manually, but you can simply return a POJO which will be mapped into JSON just like from a regular REST controller. Since Spring 4.3 you can also use @RestControllerAdvice, which is a combination of @ControllerAdvice and @ResponseBody.

However, this approach doesn't work because the exception is thrown by the AbstractSecurityInterceptor and handled by ExceptionTranslationFilter before any controller is reached.