Security is one of the most important aspects of an application for maintaining Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability of the data in the application. Data Confidentiality is achieved by protecting data from unauthorized access by a third person to any information. This can be achieved by techniques like data encryption, authentication, authorization, etc.,

Data integrity refers to the trustworthiness and correctness of the data in the database protecting it from unauthorized modification or corruption. Data Availability is a feature of making the data available to the user subjectively based on the user's role. This again deals with the authorization of the data. In Short, Data security is the method of achieving data Integrity, Confidentiality and Availability in an application.

Securing Java Applications

Again just like any other application java applications should also be secured in perspective of authentication, authorization, data encryption, etc., When it comes to traditional Java applications that are built on core technologies like Servlet, there were various methods to secure the applications like maintaining the HttpSession between user and server, performing internal validation to achieve access control for a user-role, etc.,

But when It comes to securing a Java application that is built on Spring Framework the most popular library used is Spring Security. Spring Security can be called a library but it is mostly termed as a project that comes with the Spring Project Ecosystem. Again technically it can be called a library providing a set of classes and Interfaces helping to enable security in a Spring-based application.

Spring Security

Spring Security is one of the projects of Spring Ecosystem, used for implementing security over a Java Application that is built on Spring Framework. Spring Security provides the following features:

Note: do not get overwhelmed by the amount of technical terms used below. We will gonna explore them slowly step by step.

Features

• Authentication: Spring Security allows you to authenticate users, ensuring that they are who they claim to be. It supports various authentication mechanisms, including username/password, OAuth, and integration with external identity providers like LDAP and OAuth providers.

• Authorization: Once users are authenticated, Spring Security enables you to control what they can and cannot do within your application. You can define fine-grained access control rules based on roles, permissions, and expressions.

• User Management: Spring Security offers user management features, including account locking, password policies, and the ability to store user details in databases or custom repositories.

• Session Management: It provides tools for managing user sessions, including session fixation protection, concurrent session control, and session timeout handling.

• Password Encryption: Spring Security offers password encoding and hashing mechanisms to securely store and validate user passwords.

• Security Filters: The framework uses a chain of security filters to intercept and process incoming requests. These filters handle tasks such as authentication, authorization, and CSRF protection.

• Integration with Spring Framework: Spring Security seamlessly integrates with the broader Spring ecosystem, allowing you to use Spring beans, annotations, and features for building secure applications.

• Customization: You can customize Spring Security to fit the specific security requirements of your application. This includes creating custom authentication providers, user details services and access control rules.

• OAuth and OpenID Connect: Spring Security provides built-in support for implementing OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect for secure API and single sign-on (SSO) scenarios.

• Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) Protection: Spring Security helps prevent CSRF attacks by generating and validating tokens for web requests.

• Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS): It supports configuring CORS policies to control how resources on your server can be accessed from different domains or origins.

• Comprehensive Documentation: Spring Security offers extensive documentation and resources to help developers understand and implement security features effectively.

Conclusion

In the article today, we discussed what it means by security to an application and what techniques a Java application uses to ensure security over Data Confidentiality, availability and Integrity. Also, we discussed Spring Security features from a broader perspective.

In the next article of this series Walk-Thorugh Spring Security, we will discuss more on workflows for Authentication and Authorization processes. I hope you found this information helpful. Please leave a comment below if you have any questions.