Develop Reference

spring security is not filtering access to resources based on roles

i am using spring security 3.1.4. for some reason, access to resources is not being filtered correctly. my security xml file looks like the following.
<http auto-config="true">
<intercept-url pattern="/**" access="ROLE_USER"/>
<intercept-url pattern="/admin/**" access="ROLE_ADMIN"/>
...
</http>
as you can see, what i want to express with this configuration is that a USER can access any resource unless they are accessing resources mapped to /admin/something.
when i log in as a user with ROLE_USER only (verified in the database, as i am using the jdbc-user-service), i can still point my browser to
/myapp/admin/default
and see all the contents.
i then change my security xml to look like the following.
<http auto-config="true">
<intercept-url pattern="/**" access="ROLE_ADMIN"/>
<intercept-url pattern="/admin/**" access="ROLE_ADMIN"/>
...
</http>
when i log in as a user with ROLE_USER, then i get a HTTP 403 Access is denied.
my questions are
how come /admin/** (ROLE_ADMIN) does not override /** (ROLE_USER) ?
which filter (or where in the code precisely) does the actual check of roles and resources? i took a look at FilterSecurityInterceptor but the code seems to just be passing objects around.
how do i fix this problem? do i have to define /user/** for ROLE_USER and /admin/** for ROLE_ADMIN ? it looks like that's a possible solution.
any help is appreciated.

Try putting the admin pattern before the more general /** pattern. From the docs (http://docs.spring.io/spring-security/site/docs/3.0.x/reference/core-web-filters.html) the most specific patterns need to be declared higher in the list of patterns.
<http auto-config="true">
<intercept-url pattern="/admin/**" access="ROLE_ADMIN"/>
<intercept-url pattern="/**" access="ROLE_USER"/>
...
</http>

Spring security for overlap URL range

I don't know how to configure spring security to specify different ROLEs for overlaping URLs.
<sec:intercept-url pattern="/app/ws**" access="ROLE_WEBSERVICE"/>
<sec:intercept-url pattern="/app**" access="ROLE_ADMIN"/>
I need to accept user with role ROLE_WEBSERVICE on /app/ws** even if this user does not have user ROLE_ADMIN.
Could you point me to the correct place of documentation? I could not find it. Thanks.

If you switch to an expression rule instead of the vanilla RoleVoter you get more flexibility, e.g.
<http use-expressions="true">
...
<intercept-url pattern="/app/ws**" access="hasRole('ROLE_WEBSERVICE') and hasRole('ROLE_ADMIN')"/>
<intercept-url pattern="/app**" access="hasRole('ROLE_ADMIN')"/>
...

what is the use of auto-config=true in spring security

what is the use of auto-config=true in spring security.
In which scenario we should use this.
what is the actual use of using auto-config=true ?

auto-config="true" is equivalent to:
<http>
<form-login />
<http-basic />
<logout />
</http>
so it gives you a very basic security configuration to boot.
Source: https://docs.spring.io/spring-security/site/docs/3.1.x/reference/springsecurity-single.html#ns-auto-config

auto-config='true' means
for the intercept-url pattern the spring security provides the default login screen

This is one of the cases where we use auto-config = true:
<http auto-config='true'>
<intercept-url pattern="/**" access="ROLE_USER" />
</http>
This declaration means we want all URLs within our application to be secured, requiring the role ROLE_USER to access them. The element is the parent for all web-related namespace functionality. The element defines a pattern which is matched against the URLs of incoming requests using an ant path style syntax

Spring Security Reference:
"Use of this attribute is not recommended. Use explicit configuration elements instead to avoid confusion."
Source: https://docs.spring.io/spring-security/site/docs/3.2.x/reference/htmlsingle/html5/#nsa-http-attributes

Disable Access if Logged in

I'm using Spring Security. I need to block the access to Login page if user is authenticated. The following line is giving error.
<intercept-url pattern="/user/**" access="!IS_AUTHENTICATED_FULLY" />
Error is unsupported configuration.

either you can use IS_AUTHENTICATED_ANONYMOUSLY (to allow access only if user is authenticated anonymously), or enable expressions and use IsAuthenticated() like given below
<http use-expressions="true">
<intercept-url pattern="/user/**"
access="isAuthenticated()"/>
...
</http>

Using Spring Security 3.1 to secure the same RESTful resources with both form-login and http-basic security

I have a java web application running on Tomcat 7.
I am using Spring 3.2 with Spring Security 3.1 on the backend, and am exposing an API via RESTful URLs following the /api/** pattern.
The UI for the web application is built using BackboneJS. I am using Backbone models mapped directly to the RESTful URLS.
The UI is locked down using form-login authentication, so the user is always redirected to the login screen if they have are not currently authenticated.
I am now attempting to expose the same RESTful URLs to another external service using http-basic authentication. Unfortunately, when securing the same URL pattern, it seems Spring will not allow me to use more than one filter chain. Whichever is defined first in the configuration file seems to take precedence.
I would hate to have to map to separate URL patterns for the same RESTful resources, but it seems like I may not have a choice.
Here is the important sample of my (currently broken) spring security configuration:
<!-- configure basic http authentication -->
<http pattern="/api/**" create-session="stateless">
<intercept-url pattern="/**" access="ROLE_USER"/>
<http-basic/>
</http>
<!-- configure form-login authentication -->
<http auto-config="true" use-expressions="true">
<intercept-url pattern="/ui/login" access="permitAll" />
<intercept-url pattern="/ui/logout" access="permitAll" />
<intercept-url pattern="/ui/loginfailed" access="permitAll" />
<intercept-url pattern="/**" access="ROLE_USER" />
<custom-filter ref="ajaxTimeoutRedirectFilter" after="EXCEPTION_TRANSLATION_FILTER" />
<form-login login-page="/ui/login" default-target-url="/" authentication-failure-url="/ui/loginfailed" />
<logout logout-success-url="/ui/logout" />
<session-management invalid-session-url="/ui/login"/>
</http>
My question is:
Is it possible to configure two different types of security (http-basic and form-login) for the same URL patterns using Spring Security? Is there a best practice for this type of scenario?
Thank you.

Why don't you just merge the two <http> elements like this:
<http pattern="/api/**" use-expressions="true">
<intercept-url pattern="/ui/login" access="permitAll" />
<intercept-url pattern="/ui/logout" access="permitAll" />
<intercept-url pattern="/ui/loginfailed" access="permitAll" />
<intercept-url pattern="/**" access="ROLE_USER" />
<http-basic/>
<custom-filter ref="ajaxTimeoutRedirectFilter" after="EXCEPTION_TRANSLATION_FILTER" />
<form-login login-page="/ui/login" default-target-url="/" authentication-failure-url="/ui/loginfailed" />
<logout logout-success-url="/ui/logout" />
<session-management invalid-session-url="/ui/login"/>
</http>
This would set up both a UsernamePasswordAuthenticationFilter and a BasicAuthenticationFilter in the same filter chain which could serve the ui client, and the external service as well.

Not possible out of the box to apply 2 different filter chain for a single URL pattern.
But it is a advisable to have unique URL patterns as UI and API, as you would have to apply a completely different filter chain in future.
For example the SecurityContextRepository hold the session information and is retrieved for each request. You don't want to apply the same for UI and API access through basic auth

Try to replace pattern="/" by pattern="/api/" in API config:
<http pattern="/api/**" create-session="stateless">
<intercept-url pattern="/api/**" access="ROLE_USER"/>
<http-basic/>
</http>