Why apache shiro

And you should be able to do it in under 10 minutes. Apache Shiro is a powerful and easy to use Java security framework that offers developers an intuitive yet comprehensive solution to authentication, authorization, cryptography, and session management.

It is built on sound interface-driven design and OO principles, enabling custom behavior wherever you can imagine it. A lot. This target will just print out some log messages to let you know what is going on and then exit. Change that file and run the above mvn compile exec:java command as often as you like. The Quickstart. Now lets break it down in chunks here so you can easily understand what is going on. Using SecurityUtils.

Mar 14, 32 min read. Les Hazlewood. Download the FREE gudeide. Are you frustrated when you try to secure your applications? Do you feel existing Java security solutions are difficult to use and only confuse you further? This article introduces Apache Shiro , a Java security framework that provides a simple but powerful approach to application security.

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Shiro provides the application security API to perform the following aspects I like to call these the 4 cornerstones of application security :. Shiro also supports some auxiliary features, such as web application security, unit testing, and multithreading support, but these exist to reinforce the above four primary concerns.

Before entering the Apache Software Foundation in , Shiro was already 5 years old and previously known as the JSecurity project, which started in early There were a lot of shortcomings with JAAS - while its authentication capabilities were somewhat tolerable, the authorization aspects were obtuse and frustrating to use.

As an application developer, I cared more about what an application end-user could do rather than what my code could do inside the JVM. Due to the applications I was working with at the time, I also needed access to a clean, container-agnostic session mechanism. The only session choices in the game at the time were HttpSessions, which required a web container, or EBJ 2. I needed something that could be decoupled from the container, usable in any environment I chose.

Finally, there was the issue of cryptography. There are times when we all need to keep data secure, but the Java Cryptography Architecture was hard to understand unless you were a crypto expert.

The API was full of checked exceptions and felt cumbersome to use. I was hoping for a cleaner out-of-the-box solution to easily encrypt and decrypt data as necessary. So looking at the security landscape of early , you can quickly realize that there was nothing that could satisfy all of those requirements in a single, cohesive framework.

Because of that, JSecurity, and then later, Apache Shiro, was born. The framework landscape has changed quite a bit since , so there should still be a compelling reason to use Shiro today. There are quite a few reasons actually. Apache Shiro is:. Shiro and its predecessor JSecurity has been in use for years in projects for companies of all sizes and across industries. Since becoming an Apache Software Foundation Top Level Project, site traffic and adoption have continued to grow significantly.

Commercial companies like Katasoft, Sonatype, MuleSoft, one of the major social networks, and more than a few New York commercial banks use Shiro to secure their commercial software and websites.

It is common for us to ask ourselves these questions as we're writing code or designing user interfaces: applications are usually built based on user stories, and you want functionality represented and secured based on a per-user basis.

So, the most natural way for us to think about security in our application is based on the current user. The word Subject is a security term that basically means "the currently executing user". It's just not called a 'User' because the word 'User' is usually associated with a human being. In the security world, the term 'Subject' can mean a human being, but also a 3 rd party process, daemon account, or anything similar.

It simply means 'the thing that is currently interacting with the software'. You can easily acquire the Shiro Subject anywhere in your code as shown in Listing 1 below.

It is also easy to access a Subject anywhere in code, allowing security operations to occur anywhere they are needed. While the Subject represents security operations for the current user, the SecurityManager manages security operations for all users. However, once the SecurityManager and its internal object graph is configured, it is usually left alone and application developers spend almost all of their time with the Subject API.

So how do you set up a SecurityManager? Well, that depends on your application environment. For example, a web application will usually specify a Shiro Servlet Filter in web. But there are many of configuration options. There is almost always a single SecurityManager instance per application. It is essentially an application singleton although it does not need to be a static singleton.

Basically anything that is capable of instantiating classes and calling JavaBeans-compatible methods may be used. INI is easy to read, simple to use, and requires very few dependencies. There are two INI sections: [main] and [users]. In this example, we see two objects being configured:. The [users] section is where you can specify a static list of user accounts - convenient for simple applications or when testing.

For the purposes of this introduction, it is not important to understand the intricacies of each section, but rather to see that INI configuration is one simple way of configuring Shiro. For more detailed information on INI configuration, please see Shiro's documentation. The third and final core concept in Shiro is that of a Realm. That is, when it comes time to actually interact with security-related data like user accounts to perform authentication login and authorization access control , Shiro looks up many of these things from one or more Realms configured for an application.

In this sense a Realm is essentially a security-specific DAO : it encapsulates connection details for data sources and makes the associated data available to Shiro as needed. More than one Realm may be configured, but at least one is required. You can plug-in your own Realm implementations to represent custom data sources if the default Realms do not meet your needs.

Authentication is the process of verifying a user's identity. That is, when a user authenticates with an application, they are proving they actually are who they say they are. This is also sometimes referred to as 'login'. This is typically a three-step process. When most users login to a software application, they usually provide their username the principal and their supporting password the credential. Such cases lend themselves to executing the extensive operations only once before testing the authorizations.

In this example, the structure of the file tree could, e. The question of how a user has access to their authorizations is not handled in this article. In general, what a user is allowed to do is stored in a data base with a role and authorization concept.

When Permission s are being assigned in the Realm , this information is used to generate the appropriate Permission s. Caution is advised here as well: If nothing else is done, Shiro asks for the Permission s a user has every time a test regarding rights is executed. This could mean an unnecessary burden. Hallo zusammen! Seit dem Skip to content Apache Shiro: Implementing complex permissions autonomously Although Apache Shiro includes a powerful and flexible tool for fine-grained allocation of authorizations with its WildcardPermission s, one is faced with its limitations when it comes to complex scenarios.

This article shows how any authorization checks can be implemented autonomously using the Permission interface. Authorization with Apache Shiro With Apache Shiro, Java developers have a comprehensive and perfected security framework with the core features authentication, authorization, session management and cryptography at their disposal.

Shiro permissions Shiro offers two concepts for authorization: Roles and permissions. Shiro fundamentals Let us now look at the basic operation of Shiro before we consider the limitations of string based WildcardPermission s. Requirements of complex Permission s With the string-based WildcardPermission s, developers have a simple tool at their disposal which can be used to implement rather complex scenarios.

Let us assume, for example, that we want to model authorizations on a file tree as follows: File access can be authorized for reading or writing. Files that have writing access also have reading access. When access to a file is permitted reading access to all superordinate directories must also be permitted in order to be able to navigate to the file.

If a directory is authorized for reading or writing, this authorization is inherited by all subordinate directories and files. With this definition, there are three conditions that result in a user having access to a file: 1. We believe Sessions are a business-tier concern that should be accessible in any client or server environment. Security code should be eliminated as much as possible in favor of a cleaner declarative security model utilizing JDK 1.

Last but definitely not least, a security framework should support a dynamic , instance-level security model out-of-the-box i. An evaluating developer should grasp all the fundamentals within 10 minutes. Develop a production-quality implementation that can be used in any deployment environment, from the simplest Applet to the largest high-availability clustered enterprise applications.

Foster a positive open-source developer community, listening to suggestions and requests in order to provide the highest quality security framework available for Java.

An administrator determines the user is potentially a high-risk employee disgruntled, unstable, whatever , and changes that user's permissions to prevent them from clicking that button again. The very next instant, the same user clicks the same button again to alter the hardware's state this time perhaps to do something that isn't very nice.

Because the user's permissions were changed, the second button click fails and shows them a nice error message explaining that they don't have permission for the operation. Security changes had to be instantaneous.