A Guide to Spring Boot 3 Security Features and Best Practices

Spring Boot 3 is the latest major release of the popular framework for building web applications and microservices with Java. Spring Boot 3 comes with many improvements and changes, especially in the area of security. In this blog post, I will introduce some of the new security features and best practices that you can use to secure your Spring Boot 3 applications.

What’s new in Spring Boot 3 security?

Spring Boot 3 security is based on Spring Security 6, which is the latest version of the powerful and flexible library that provides authentication and authorization features for Spring applications. Spring Security 6 introduces several new features and enhancements

• A new component-based security configuration model, which replaces the deprecated WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter and allows for more flexibility and modularity in defining security filter chains.
• A new reactive security stack, which supports reactive web applications and reactive data access with Spring WebFlux and Spring Data R2DBC.
• A new OAuth 2.0 client support, which enables easy integration with external OAuth 2.0 providers and OpenID Connect for authentication and authorization.
• A new password encoder API, which supports modern hashing algorithms and adaptive hashing functions, such as Argon2, BCrypt, PBKDF2, and SCrypt.
• A new first-class support for JWT (JSON Web Tokens), which enables stateless and self-contained authentication and authorization with JWT-based tokens.
• A new support for CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing), which allows for cross-domain requests and responses with fine-grained control over the allowed origins, methods, headers, and credentials.

Spring Boot 3 security features and best practices

To use Spring Boot 3 security features and best practices-

• Create a Spring Boot 3 project with the necessary dependencies, such as Spring Web, Spring Security, Spring Data JPA, Lombok, and JWT. You can use Spring Initializr to generate a project with these dependencies.
• Configure the application properties, such as the database connection, the JWT secret key, and the JWT expiration time. You can use the application.properties or application.yml file to set these properties.
• Create the domain model and the repository classes for the user and the role entities, using JPA annotations and Lombok annotations. You can use the @Entity, @Table, @Id, @GeneratedValue, @Column, @ManyToMany, @JoinTable, @Data, and @NoArgsConstructor annotations to define these classes.
• Create the service and the controller classes for the user and the authentication endpoints, using Spring annotations and JWT methods. You can use the @Service, @RestController, @RequestMapping, @GetMapping, @PostMapping, @RequestBody, @Autowired, @PreAuthorize, Jwts, and Claims annotations and classes to define these classes.
• Create the security configuration class, using Spring Security annotations and methods, to define the security filter chain, the authentication manager, the password encoder, the user details service, and the JWT filter. You can use the @Configuration, @EnableWebSecurity, @Bean, SecurityFilterChain, HttpSecurity, AuthenticationManager, PasswordEncoder, UserDetailsService, UserDetails, GrantedAuthority, SimpleGrantedAuthority, UsernamePasswordAuthenticationToken, and OncePerRequestFilter annotations and classes to define this class.