I have seen lot of examples where, there is a custom Login page with Angular JS, and then we make a rest POST call with the username/pwd, and then Spring authenticates based on whatever Auth Service we provide. Then we receive a success, grab the user object from Spring Security and then create a Session cookie in Angular. https://github.com/witoldsz/angular-http-auth/blob/master/src/http-auth-interceptor.js
I also have seen, integrating Siteminder with Spring Security where we install a policy agent on the web server, and then grab request headers with Spring Security, and then pull the roles and build a user profile object.
I'm looking for a solution where I can combine both the above. This is the scenario :
When the user requests for index.html (Angular), the policy agent on the web server intercepts, authenticates with a Siteminder login page and then passes the headers to the app server. The Spring Security on app server will read the headers and pull the roles from our app database and then build a userprofile object. Now here, I want to continue the flow and display angular page, but Im trying to figure out, how do I send the user profile object to angular, because angular is not making a POST call at this point. Also, how do I get the http-auth-interceptor in play, because I need to keep checking if the user is still authenticated on the change of every view/state in Angular.
Help appreciated ! Thanks !
You may implement a tiny JSON REST service "/your-app/profile" which is protected by SiteMinder, reads and evaluates the headers and returns the result as a JSON object.
Your Angular App (e.g. /your-app/index.html) should better also be protected by SiteMinder so you receive an immediate redirect to the SSO Login when accessing it without session. In addition, it must read the JSON REST resource "/your-app/profile" when loaded. It must also expect that SMSESSION is missing when reading "/your-app/profile" and react accordingly - perform a reload of the protected index.html page to trigger a SM SSO re-login (if "/your-app/index.html" is protected, otherwise you must trigger login by a redirect to some protected resource).
If you want to constantly check to see if SiteMinder session is still present, you may either access the "/your-app/profile" or check for the presence of the SMSESSION cookie (only in case it is not set as HTTP-only).
One SECURITY NOTE: If you rely on the seamless SSO which is provided via SMSESSION cookie, be aware of the possible CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) attacks!