RESTful Authentication via Spring

We managed to get this working exactly as described in the OP, and hopefully someone else can make use of the solution. Here’s what we did:

Set up the security context like so:

<security:http realm="Protected API" use-expressions="true" auto-config="false" create-session="stateless" entry-point-ref="CustomAuthenticationEntryPoint">
    <security:custom-filter ref="authenticationTokenProcessingFilter" position="FORM_LOGIN_FILTER" />
    <security:intercept-url pattern="/authenticate" access="permitAll"/>
    <security:intercept-url pattern="/**" access="isAuthenticated()" />
</security:http>

<bean id="CustomAuthenticationEntryPoint"
    class="com.demo.api.support.spring.CustomAuthenticationEntryPoint" />

<bean id="authenticationTokenProcessingFilter"
    class="com.demo.api.support.spring.AuthenticationTokenProcessingFilter" >
    <constructor-arg ref="authenticationManager" />
</bean>

As you can see, we’ve created a custom AuthenticationEntryPoint, which basically just returns a 401 Unauthorized if the request wasn’t authenticated in the filter chain by our AuthenticationTokenProcessingFilter.

CustomAuthenticationEntryPoint:

public class CustomAuthenticationEntryPoint implements AuthenticationEntryPoint {
    @Override
    public void commence(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response,
            AuthenticationException authException) throws IOException, ServletException {
        response.sendError( HttpServletResponse.SC_UNAUTHORIZED, "Unauthorized: Authentication token was either missing or invalid." );
    }
}

AuthenticationTokenProcessingFilter:

public class AuthenticationTokenProcessingFilter extends GenericFilterBean {

    @Autowired UserService userService;
    @Autowired TokenUtils tokenUtils;
    AuthenticationManager authManager;
    
    public AuthenticationTokenProcessingFilter(AuthenticationManager authManager) {
        this.authManager = authManager;
    }

    @Override
    public void doFilter(ServletRequest request, ServletResponse response,
            FilterChain chain) throws IOException, ServletException {
        @SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
        Map<String, String[]> parms = request.getParameterMap();

        if(parms.containsKey("token")) {
            String token = parms.get("token")[0]; // grab the first "token" parameter
            
            // validate the token
            if (tokenUtils.validate(token)) {
                // determine the user based on the (already validated) token
                UserDetails userDetails = tokenUtils.getUserFromToken(token);
                // build an Authentication object with the user's info
                UsernamePasswordAuthenticationToken authentication = 
                        new UsernamePasswordAuthenticationToken(userDetails.getUsername(), userDetails.getPassword());
                authentication.setDetails(new WebAuthenticationDetailsSource().buildDetails((HttpServletRequest) request));
                // set the authentication into the SecurityContext
                SecurityContextHolder.getContext().setAuthentication(authManager.authenticate(authentication));         
            }
        }
        // continue thru the filter chain
        chain.doFilter(request, response);
    }
}

Obviously, TokenUtils contains some privy (and very case-specific) code and can’t be readily shared. Here’s its interface:

public interface TokenUtils {
    String getToken(UserDetails userDetails);
    String getToken(UserDetails userDetails, Long expiration);
    boolean validate(String token);
    UserDetails getUserFromToken(String token);
}

That ought to get you off to a good start.