Скачать или смотреть Understanding Spring Security Management of Authenticated Sessions in OAuth2

A deep dive into the management of authenticated sessions using Spring Security in an OAuth2 resource server environment. This guide addresses common concerns regarding JWT validation and session handling.
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Understanding Spring Security Management of Authenticated Sessions in OAuth2

When implementing authentication in modern web applications, developers frequently encounter challenges regarding session management, especially in the context of OAuth2. In this guide, we will clarify how Spring Security handles authenticated sessions and why it requires certain behaviors, such as the need for a JWT on each request rather than allowing continuous access through a single session.

The Problem

In a typical scenario with OAuth2 and Spring Security, developers expect that once a user is authenticated, the subsequent requests do not need to re-validate the JWT (JSON Web Token). However, one user faced the issue where their resource server required a JWT with each request, even if they were already authenticated. Specifically, after validating a JWT token, the following expectations were not met:

A session should be created or used upon successful token validation.

Subsequent requests from the same client application should authenticate using the session without requiring a new JWT each time.

Here’s a simplified overview of their attempt at configuring Spring Security:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

The system prompted unauthorized errors for requests that included a session cookie without an accompanying JWT.

Solution Explanation

To understand the behavior of Spring Security in this context, it's essential to recognize how OAuth2 flows operate, particularly regarding session handling. Let’s break this down step-by-step:

1. Sessions in OAuth2 Systems

In an OAuth2 environment, there are generally two types of sessions recognized:

Authorization Server Session: This is maintained during the OAuth2 authentication process. It stores temporary verifiers and tokens.

Client Session: This stores necessary tokens and identifiers after completing authorization flows. However, since the resource server operates statelessly, it does not persist client sessions after authentication.

2. Role of Access Tokens

In OAuth2, access tokens (like JWT) are pivotal. Here’s why:

Each request to the resource server is accompanied by an access token.

The resource server validates this token independently, ensuring the request's authenticity.

The requirement for the access token to accompany each request is expected behavior and essential to maintain security. Therefore, it is normal for the resource server to require a JWT or some form of token with every request to verify the user's authentication and permissions.

3. Expected Behavior from Spring Security

Spring Security’s design anticipates that:

Authentication information is validated with each request to ensure safety and integrity.

Sessions between client and server don't function to bypass token validation but ensure that each request retains verification through the provided access token.

In essence, while developers may desire a "single login per session" experience, OAuth2 is inherently built around stateless interactions that require validations upon each request.

4. Configuring Your Application Correctly

To set up your session management correctly in a Spring Boot application, consider using annotations and configurations effectively. A typical configuration might look like this:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

This configures a session repository, though the resource server is designed to ensure that a JWT is sent with every request.

Conclusion

When using Spring Security along with OAuth2, it is crucial to understand the framework's expectations regarding session and token handling. While it may appear inconvenient to send JWTs with every request, this is neces