Chapter 7. Authorizing user requests
This chapter covers
- Implementing authorization using Spring Security
- Using authentication levels, roles, and permissions
- Establishing access control lists
Authorization is the area of security that deals with protecting resources from users or systems—generically, principals—which aren’t allowed to view, modify, or otherwise access them. It generally builds on authentication. Authentication establishes the principal’s identity, and authorization decides what the principal is allowed to do. This chapter continues the treatment of Spring Security we began in chapter 6, this time exploring its authorization features.
Figure 7.1 shows the relationship between the types of authorization in Spring Security 3. On the one hand we have authorization targets, which correspond to what is being protected: methods, views, and web resources. On the other we have authorization styles, or how we’re protecting the targets: via authentication levels, roles, and access control lists (ACLs). Conceptually we’ll break authorization into the grid in table 7.1.
Table 7.1. Authorization combinations and their corresponding recipes
| Authorization style |
Authentication target |
||
|---|---|---|---|
| Methods | Views | Web resources | |
| Authentication-, role- and permission-based | Recipe 7.1 | Recipe 7.2 | Recipe 7.3 |
| ACL-based | Recipe 7.4 | Recipe 7.5 | Unsupported |
Each recipe addresses one of the cells in the table.