Upgrading Spring Security from 3 to 4

There are a few changes to the configuration defaults in the Spring Security 4 release that may initially break your application.

Mostly this applies to applications using XML-based configurations. In the 4.0 release, there was an effort to align the XML-based Configuration defaults with the more recent JavaConfig counterparts.

For starters, turning on DEBUG logging for org.springframework.security will give you some hints.

The first change was in the main Spring Security Filter Chain. The CSRF token filter is added to the filter chain and turned on by default. This may cause your login form submit URL to fail the CSRF check and you will see the following in the log:

06/22/2015 18:26:19 DEBUG org.springframework.security.web.FilterChainProxy (FilterChainProxy.java:324) - /doLogin at position 5 of 13 in additional filter chain; firing Filter: 'CsrfFilter'
06/22/2015 18:26:19 DEBUG org.springframework.security.web.csrf.CsrfFilter (CsrfFilter.java:106) - Invalid CSRF token found for http://localhost/unity/doUserLogin

The change is described in SEC-2347. To restore the previous functionality, you can turn off CSRF by adding a disabled <csrf> element to your <http> configuration. Keep in mind that if you don't have another mechanism for CSRF protection in your app, you really should consider enabling Spring's CSRF.

  <http use-expressions="true">
    <csrf disabled="true"/>
    <intercept-url pattern="/app/login.do"  access="permitAll()" />
    <intercept-url pattern="/app/logout.do" access="permitAll()" />
    <intercept-url pattern="/app/**"        access="isAuthenticated()" /> 
    <intercept-url pattern="/**"            access="permitAll()" />
    <form-login login-processing-url="/doLogin"
      . . .
    />
  </http>

SSL/TLS Integration between Java and .NET

Through the years, I've done a lot of integration between Java and .NET platforms. Mostly things play well together, but every once and while an interoperability issue is raised that I haven't encountered before.

Recently, we had a service written in C# on the .NET 4.5 platform that exposed a custom length-based framing protocol over TCP. Essentially requests and responses are prefixed with length-bytes which indicate the subsequent message length, and the same is true for any variable-length fields within the message itself. We needed a Java 7 client library for this service, so I wrote one that exposed a contextual service API backed by a connection pool. The pool would eventually serve-up reusable secure connections with the SSL sessions being reused as well to reduce overhead.

I had built in support for SSL throughout, but had turned it off in my local configuration for most of the development testing. At this stage, all of our concurrency and throughput tests were passing. However, when we flipped the switch to turn on secure connections, any tests that reused a connection were failing. Breaking the problem down to the smallest reproducible scope, we could recreate the issue with 2 sequential requests.

1. Create secure socket to the service and complete handshake
2. Send request A to the service
3. Receive response to A from the service, OK
4. Reuse previous secure socket
5. Send request B to the service
6. Service never responds with a response
7. Timeout occurs

Out comes Wireshark on both sides to see what's going on...

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