Security – JDev

Apache Tomcat is by far the most popular (open source) web server and Java servlet container. It has been around for a long time and – at the time of writing this post – has reached version 7.0.29. As Apache rightfully claims on its web site, Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations. Therefore, one might imagine that such a widely used server would out-of-the-box already prove to be very secure .

However, alot of weaknesses in Apache Tomcat stem from incorrect or inappropriate configuration – as is the case not only for Tomcat but for the majority of software products, I would imagine. The OWASP organization has written up a nice document with a lot of best practices and recommendations on how to make Tomcat more secure than the default out-of-the-box installation.

The OWASP document rightfully states that best practices advice us never to store clear text passwords, but that in the case of the server.xml it is very difficult to avoid. In this post, I will try to look into ways to avoid storing clear text password in Tomcat’s files that hopefully will make it less difficult to avoid.
Continue reading “Encrypting passwords in Tomcat”

In this tutorial I describe how you can setup Wicket 1.5 to use Spring Security 3.1 for authentication and Wicket Auth/Roles for authorization.

Spring Security is a very complete and flexible solution for all kinds of security needs. It offers a lot of functionality out-of-the-box and it is quite easy to extend to fit your own custom needs. Visit the Spring Security website (http://static.springsource.org/spring-security/site/index.html) for more information.

Wicket Auth/Roles makes it easy to annotate components with authorization information. E.g., the @AuthorizeInstantiation configures what roles are allowed to instantiate the annotated component or package, and the @AuthorizeAction annotation controls wether the component is rendered or not based on the roles.

At the and of this tutorial you will have a sample Wicket project that uses Spring Security to look up the user – including roles, full name, etc. -, validate the password, and manage the current user session. Wicket Auth/Roles validates whether the current user has access to a particular page, or even a particular component. Continue reading “Integrating Wicket with Wicket Auth/Roles and Spring Security”