Securing a JBoss Web Application

Below are the steps for Securing any Web App deployed on Jboss EAP 5.1 or AS 5.

Step1: Edit web.xml in your application

Edit the web.xml file in your webapp at the following location:

WEB-INF/web.xml

Edit your web.xml and put the following contents (generally towards the bottom of the file)

<security-constraint>
     <web-resource-collection>
       <web-resource-name>All resources</web-resource-name>
       <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
     </web-resource-collection>
     <auth-constraint>
       <role-name>myrole</role-name>
     </auth-constraint>
   </security-constraint>
   <login-config>
      <auth-method>BASIC</auth-method>
      <realm-name>Confidential</realm-name>
   </login-config>
   <security-role>
      <role-name>myrole</role-name>
   </security-role>

This is a way of telling the container to restrict all URLs to any user with the role ‘myrole‘.

Step 2: Create jboss-web.xml in your application

Edit or create the jboss-web.xml file in your webapp at the following location:

WEB-INF/jboss-web.xml 

<!DOCTYPE jboss-web PUBLIC
   "-//JBoss//DTD Web Application 5.0//EN"
   "http://www.jboss.org/j2ee/dtd/jboss-web_5_0.dtd">

<jboss-web>
        <security-domain>java:/jaas/"Myappname"</security-domain>
</jboss-web>

"Myappname" is  Policy name that we are going to use further. Actually this tells JBOSS to use application Policy name 'Myappname' for this application.

Step 3: Create Application policy on JBoss server

We now need to define the application policy ‘Myappname‘ on JBoss server.

Edit the login-config.xml file in the JBoss server directory at the following location:

jboss/server/<profile>/conf/login-config.xml  

Edit the contents of login-config.xml and add an application policy as follows:

<!-- application policy for myappname -->
<application-policy name="365black">
        <authentication>
             <login-module code="org.jboss.security.auth.spi.UsersRolesLoginModule" flag="required">
                   <module-option name="usersProperties">props/users.properties</module-option>
                   <module-option name="rolesProperties">props/roles.properties</module-option>
             </login-module>
       </authentication>
</application-policy> 

 This tells JBoss to user ‘UsersRolesLoginModule’ which uses property files to store users and roles.

Step 4: Create users on JBoss server

Now we create a new user with the role ‘myrole’.

Create a new User

Edit the users.properties file used by your application policy in Step 3:

jboss/server/<profile>/conf/props/users.properties

Add a line to create a new user as follows.

myuser=mypassword

Roles

Finally, we assign the role ‘myrole’ to the user ‘myuser’. Edit the following file

Create a new roleEdit the roles.properties file used by your application policy in Step 3.

 jboss/server/<profile>/conf/props/roles.properties

Add a line to create a assign the role ‘myrole’ to ‘myuser’ as follows.

myuser=myrole 

Test your settings

Restart the JBoss server and deploy your application. When you access your application, you should see a basic authentication popup

If your setup is correct, you should be able to login using ‘myuser’ and ‘mypassword’ as defined in the Step 4.

Here we have used BASIC authentication in this example, but we can also use other types as  DIGEST, FORM or CLIENT-CERT.

Thanks!!