Spring-Security: Return Status 401 When AuthenticationManager Throws BadCredentialsException

Question

First of all, I'd like to point that I don't know Spring Security very much, actually I know quite little about its interfaces and classes, but I got a not so simple task to do and can't quite figure it out. My code is based in the following post in the Spring Security Forum (I'm not having the same problem as the post owner): http://forum.spring.io/forum/spring-projects/security/747178-security-filter-chain-is-always-calling-authenticationmanager-twice-per-request

I'm programming a Spring MVC system which will serve HTTP content but, in order to do so, it has a preauth check (which I'm currently using RequestHeaderAuthenticationFilter with a custom AuthenticationManager).

To authorize the user, I'll check the token against two sources, a Redis cache "database" and Oracle. If the token is not found in any of those sources, the authenticate method of my custom AuthenticationManager throws a BadCredentialsException (which I believe honours the AuthenticationManager contract).

Now I'd like to return in the HTTP response 401 - Unauthorized, but Spring keeps returning 500 - Server Error. Is it possible to customize my setup to return only 401 not 500?

Here's the relevant code:

SecurityConfig - main spring security config

package br.com.oiinternet.imoi.web.config;

import javax.validation.constraints.NotNull;

import org.slf4j.Logger;
import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.security.SecurityProperties;
import org.springframework.context.ApplicationContext;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Bean;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
import org.springframework.core.annotation.Order;
import org.springframework.http.HttpMethod;
import org.springframework.security.authentication.AuthenticationManager;
import org.springframework.security.config.annotation.web.builders.HttpSecurity;
import org.springframework.security.config.annotation.web.configuration.EnableWebSecurity;
import org.springframework.security.config.annotation.web.configuration.WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter;
import org.springframework.security.config.http.SessionCreationPolicy;
import org.springframework.security.web.AuthenticationEntryPoint;
import org.springframework.security.web.access.AccessDeniedHandler;
import org.springframework.security.web.access.AccessDeniedHandlerImpl;
import org.springframework.security.web.authentication.Http403ForbiddenEntryPoint;
import org.springframework.security.web.authentication.logout.LogoutFilter;
import org.springframework.security.web.authentication.preauth.RequestHeaderAuthenticationFilter;

@Configuration
@EnableWebSecurity
@Order(SecurityProperties.ACCESS_OVERRIDE_ORDER)
public class SecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {

    private static final Logger LOG = LoggerFactory.getLogger(SecurityConfig.class);

    public static final String X_AUTH_TOKEN = "X-Auth-Token";

    private AccessDeniedHandler accessDeniedHandler = new AccessDeniedHandlerImpl();

    @Bean
    public AuthenticationManager authenticationManager() {
        return new TokenBasedAuthenticationManager();
    }

    @Bean
    public AuthenticationEntryPoint authenticationEntryPoint() {
        return new Http403ForbiddenEntryPoint();
    }

    @Bean
    public RequestHeaderAuthenticationFilter requestHeaderAuthenticationFilter(
            final AuthenticationManager authenticationManager) {
        RequestHeaderAuthenticationFilter filter = new RequestHeaderAuthenticationFilter();
        filter.setAuthenticationManager(authenticationManager);
        filter.setExceptionIfHeaderMissing(false);
        filter.setPrincipalRequestHeader(X_AUTH_TOKEN);
        filter.setInvalidateSessionOnPrincipalChange(true);
        filter.setCheckForPrincipalChanges(true);
        filter.setContinueFilterChainOnUnsuccessfulAuthentication(false);
        return filter;
    }

    /**
     * Configures the HTTP filter chain depending on configuration settings.
     *
     * Note that this exception is thrown in spring security headerAuthenticationFilter chain and will not be logged as
     * error. Instead the ExceptionTranslationFilter will handle it and clear the security context. Enabling DEBUG
     * logging for 'org.springframework.security' will help understanding headerAuthenticationFilter chain
     */
    @Override
    protected void configure(final HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
        RequestHeaderAuthenticationFilter requestHeaderAuthenticationFilter = fromContext(http,
                RequestHeaderAuthenticationFilter.class);

        AuthenticationEntryPoint authenticationEntryPoint = fromContext(http, AuthenticationEntryPoint.class);

        http.authorizeRequests()
            .antMatchers(HttpMethod.GET, "/auth").permitAll()
            .antMatchers(HttpMethod.GET, "/**").authenticated()
            .antMatchers(HttpMethod.POST, "/**").authenticated()
            .antMatchers(HttpMethod.HEAD, "/**").authenticated()
        .and()
            .sessionManagement()
                .sessionCreationPolicy(SessionCreationPolicy.STATELESS)
        .and().securityContext()
        .and().exceptionHandling()
                .authenticationEntryPoint(authenticationEntryPoint)
                .accessDeniedHandler(accessDeniedHandler)
        .and()
            .addFilterBefore(requestHeaderAuthenticationFilter, LogoutFilter.class);
    }

    private <T> T fromContext(@NotNull final HttpSecurity http, @NotNull final Class<T> requiredType) {
        @SuppressWarnings("SuspiciousMethodCalls")
        ApplicationContext ctx = (ApplicationContext) http.getSharedObjects().get(ApplicationContext.class);
        return ctx.getBean(requiredType);
    }
}

TokenBasedAuthenticationManager - my custom AuthenticationManager

package br.com.oiinternet.imoi.web.config;

import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;
import org.springframework.security.authentication.AuthenticationManager;
import org.springframework.security.authentication.BadCredentialsException;
import org.springframework.security.core.Authentication;
import org.springframework.security.core.AuthenticationException;

import br.com.oi.oicommons.lang.message.Messages;
import br.com.oiinternet.imoi.service.AuthService;
import br.com.oiinternet.imoi.web.security.auth.AuthenticationAuthorizationToken;

public class TokenBasedAuthenticationManager implements AuthenticationManager {

    @Autowired
    private AuthService authService;

    @Autowired
    private Messages messages;

    @Override
    public Authentication authenticate(Authentication authentication) throws AuthenticationException {

        final String token = (String) authentication.getPrincipal();

        if (authService.isAuthorized(token) || authService.authenticate(token)) {
            return new AuthenticationAuthorizationToken(token);
        } 
            throw new BadCredentialsException(messages.getMessage("access.bad.credentials"));
    }

}

Example of request/response cycle using curl:

user@user-note:curl --header "X-Auth-Token: 2592cd35124dc3d79bdd82407220a6ea7fad9b8b313a1205cf1824a5ce726aa8dd763cde8c05faadae48b47252de95b0" http://localhost:8081/test/auth -v
* Hostname was NOT found in DNS cache
*   Trying 127.0.0.1...
* Connected to localhost (127.0.0.1) port 8081 (#0)
> GET /test/auth HTTP/1.1
> User-Agent: curl/7.35.0
> Host: localhost:8081
> Accept: */*
> X-Auth-Token: 2592cd35124dc3d79bdd82407220a6ea7fad9b8b313a1205cf1824a5ce726aa8dd763cde8c05faadae48b47252de95b0
> 
< HTTP/1.1 500 Server Error
< X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
< X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
< Pragma: no-cache
< X-Frame-Options: DENY
< Content-Type: application/json;charset=UTF-8
< Connection: close
* Server Jetty(9.1.0.v20131115) is not blacklisted
< Server: Jetty(9.1.0.v20131115)
< 
* Closing connection 0
{"timestamp":1414513379405,"status":500,"error":"Internal Server Error","exception":"org.springframework.security.authentication.BadCredentialsException","message":"access.bad.credentials","path":"/test/auth"}

Solution

I have had a look at the source. It would seem that you could achieve this fairly easily by subclassing RequestHeaderAuthenticationFilter and overriding the unsuccessfulAuthentication(...) method which is called just after a failed authentication is detected and just before a new RuntimeException is thrown:

public class MyRequestHeaderAuthenticationFilter extends 
                                      RequestHeaderAuthenticationFilter {

            @Override
            protected void unsuccessfulAuthentication(HttpServletRequest request, 
                  HttpServletResponse response, AuthenticationException failed) {

                super.unsuccessfulAuthentication(request, response, failed);

                // see comments in Servlet API around using sendError as an alternative
                response.setStatus(HttpServletResponse.SC_UNAUTHORIZED);
            }
        }

Then just point your Filter Config to an instance of this.