HTTPS login with Spring Security redirects to HTTP

Question

I have a Spring web app, secured with Spring Security, running on EC2. In front of the EC2 instance is an Elastic Load Balancer with an SSL cert (https terminates at the load balancer ie. port 443 -> port 80), so from Tomcat's perspective, inbound requests are HTTP.

My login form submits to https, however the subsequent redirect goes to http (success or fail). The authentication was successful, and I can go back to https and I'm logged in.

My login configuration looks like so:

<security:form-login
    default-target-url="/home"
    login-page="/"
    login-processing-url="/processlogin"
    authentication-failure-url="/?login_error=1"/>

What do I need to change to make default-target-url and authentication-failure-url go to https?

• Tomcat 6
• Spring Security 3.0.x

Answer 1

I had the same problem with Spring Boot behind Google Kubernetes. Adding these two lines to application.properties did it for me

server.tomcat.remote-ip-header=x-forwarded-for
server.tomcat.protocol-header=x-forwarded-proto

Source: https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/reference/html/howto-security.html#howto-enable-https

Answer 2

If it is a Spring Boot application (I use currently the 2.0.0 release), the following configuration within the application.properties file should be enough:

server.tomcat.protocol-header=x-forwarded-proto

This worked for me on AWS with an load balancer at the front.

For Spring Boot < 2.0.0 it should also work (not tested)

Answer 3

I set requires-channel="any" on all intercept-urls. This allows it to still work in my dev environment where I don't use SSL.

<intercept-url pattern="/createUser" access="permitAll" requires-channel="any"/>
<intercept-url pattern="/admin/**" access="hasRole('ROLE_ADMIN')" requires-channel="any"/>
<intercept-url pattern="/**" access="isAuthenticated()" requires-channel="any"/>

Then, create an apache virtual host that redirects all traffic to the HTTPS version.

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName www.mywebsite.com
  Redirect permanent / https://www.mywebsite.com/
</VirtualHost>

Answer 4

One way I got this working is by adding the following config

<http auto-config="true" use-expressions="true" entry-point-ref="authenticationEntryPoint" >
    <form-login login-page="/login.jsf" authentication-failure-url="/login.jsf?login_error=t" always-use-default-target="true" default-target-url="xxxxx" />
    <logout logout-url="/logout" logout-success-url="/logoutSuccess.jsf" />
    ...
</http>

Had to add always-use-default-target="true" and default-target-url="https://....". Not the ideal way as you need to hard code the url in the config.

Answer 5

I am also facing exactly same problem and till the time I get proper solution I am redirecting my requests from proxy server to tomcat server over AJP instead of HTTP. Below is my apache configuration

ProxyPass /myproject ajp://localhost:8009/myproject
ProxyPassReverse /myproject ajp://localhost:8009/myproject

Answer 6

Your spring configuration should be agnostic to the used protocol. If you use something like "requires-channel", you'll run into problems sooner or later, especially if you want to deploy the same application to a development environment without https.

Instead, consider to configure your tomcat properly. You can do this with RemoteIpValve. Depending on which headers the loadbalancer sends, your server.xml configuration needs to contain something like this:

<Valve
   className="org.apache.catalina.valves.RemoteIpValve"
   internalProxies=".*"
   protocolHeader="X-Forwarded-Proto"
   httpsServerPort="443"
   />

Spring will determine the absolute redirect address based on the ServletRequest, so change the httpsServerPort if you are using something else than 443:

The httpsServerPort is the port returned by ServletRequest.getServerPort() when the protocolHeader indicates https protocol