Even though spring security provides role-based access control it doesn’t allow users to perform policy-based authorization. The main goal of this project is to write an agent which can be used to perform attribute-based access control for Spring security.

Spring security provides an annotation for custom authorization evaluations.

As the initial version, I have managed to write a working sample for this use case. This sample talks to WSO2 PDP for authorization.

1. Create a keystore and a trustStore in Resources directory.

2. Create a file named xacmlConfig.json in Resources directory. This file contains the body of the XACML request.

   • This file is a json file and this can have more than one Target Domain Objects. In this case let's define our target domain object as admin_xacml.
   • All the variables should start with '$'. For example if action-id is the variable it should be defined in the xacmlConfig.sjon as $action-id.

   A sample xacmlConfig.json file is as follows.

   {
     "admin_xacml": {
       "Request": {
         "Action": {
           "Attribute": [
             {
               "AttributeId": "urn:oasis:names:tc:xacml:1.0:action:action-id",
               "Value": "$action-id"
             }
           ]
         },
         "Resource": {
           "Attribute": [
             {
               "AttributeId": "urn:oasis:names:tc:xacml:1.0:resource:resource-id",
               "Value": "$resource-id"
             }
           ]
         }
       }
     }
   }
   

3. Extend GlobalMethodSecurityConfiguration class and set AttributeEvaluator as the new PermissionEvaluator

   @Configuration
   @EnableGlobalMethodSecurity(prePostEnabled = true)
   public class MethodSecurityConfig extends GlobalMethodSecurityConfiguration {
   
       @Override
       protected MethodSecurityExpressionHandler createExpressionHandler() {
   
           DefaultMethodSecurityExpressionHandler expressionHandler =
                   new DefaultMethodSecurityExpressionHandler();
           expressionHandler.setPermissionEvaluator(new AttributeEvaluator());
           return expressionHandler;
       }
   }
   

4. Now add the @PreAuthorize("hasPermission()") or @PostAuthorize("hasPermission()") annotation as required before the correct controller method. Target Domain Object and the Permissions should be passed to this annotaion as parameters.Permissions is a json object which contains the key value pairs. These permission values will be extracted from the headers.

    @PreAuthorize("hasPermission('admin_xacml','{$action-id:action-id,$resource-id:resource-id}')")