How do I get Basic Authentication, GlassFish, REST, and a single page application to all work together with my own login form?

Question

I'm using Glassfish 4 as a server with an AngularJS app as a client. Glassfish is exposing a REST API via JAX-RS (Jersey). I'm using Basic Authentication over an HTTPS connection. I have my own login form and am setting the Authorization header in my REST requests via JavaScript. My issue is that if I use normal web.xml based permissions (<auth-constraint> inside <security-constraint>), the responses come back with 401 with a WWW-Authenticate header (if the credentials are bad). This forces the browser to do the Basic Authentication dialog instead of my own and it appears there is no viable cross browser work around available on the browser side to stop it. So I need to somehow suppress the 401/WWW-Authenticate response.

I stopped using the web.xml based permissions, because it seems it is the Servlet level that is doing the 401 stuff. I was able to get Jersey authentication working with a filter and turning on the "RolesAllowedDynamicFeature" feature (in a matter similar to Glassfish @RolesAllowed with custom SecurityContext). That seems to work great and returns 403 for bad credentials (and thus no browser dialog). However, when I call my EJB's, they do not see the custom security context and the user I have set, so I get permission exceptions. If it matters: the EJB's are in a jar, the Jersey stuff is in a war, and both of them and bundled together in an ear. From what I can gather the only way to have the EJB's properly process credentials is to use the web.xml stuff.

I seemed to have painted myself into a corner and do not see how to make this work. Perhaps I can back out and return to using web.xml based permissions and somehow filter the servlet responses to not return 401/WWW-Authenticate? If so I could not find out how to do that. Or is there some way I can set EJB's security context? Or something else entirely? I wouldn't think using AngularJS with GlassFish and a REST API and Basic Authentication would be very unique, how does anyone do this?

Answer 1

Since posting this question I have found info on implementing a Servlet filter and using that to try to change the 401 response to a different status code. However, the filter never gains control if you have <auth-constraint> in your web.xml and the request is not authorized, so that did not help me. I still could not prevent the 401 responses.

But now I think I finally found the answer. I removed the <auth-constraint> tag from web.xml. I changed the Servlet filter to now extract the AUTHENTICATION_HEADER on its own and decode it (via javax.xml.bind.DatatypeConverter). Next I call HttpServletRequest.login (on the request object) with the decoded username and password. I catch the ServletException if the username/password combination is bad and use HttpServletResponse.sendError to send SC_FORBIDDEN. If I have a good login I call doFilter to continue on with processing of the request, and call HttpServletRequest.logout when it returns.

If I do this in combination with RolesAllowedDynamicFeature and annotations on the Jersey routines everything seems to work including calls to EJB's with their own security annotations.

Side note: before settling on HttpServletRequest.login I had tried to use HttpServletRequest.authenticate followed by checking the returned boolean, but when you gain control in that case the response has already been committed to be 401 and you cannot change it. I even tried passing a HttpServletResponseWrapper to authenticate to stop the commit from happening, but authenticate seems to get the response object through some other means, it seems to ignore the one you pass it (I even tried passed null and it didn't even notice).