spring - remember-me and authentication-success-handler

Question

i have strange issue of for login sucess and redirect to page.

below is my spring security configuration.

<http auto-config="true" use-expressions="true">
    <intercept-url pattern="/login.hst**" access="anonymous or authenticated" />
    <intercept-url pattern="/**/*.hst" access="authenticated" />
    <form-login login-page="/login.hst"
        authentication-failure-url="/login.hst?error=true"
        authentication-success-handler-ref="loginSucessHandler" />
    <logout invalidate-session="true" logout-success-url="/home.hst"
        logout-url="/logout.hst" />
    <remember-me key="jbcpHaverERP" authentication-success-handler-ref="loginSucessHandler"/>
    <session-management>
    <concurrency-control max-sessions="1" />
</session-management>
</http>

LoginSuessHandler class:

@Service
public class LoginSucessHandler extends
        SavedRequestAwareAuthenticationSuccessHandler {

    @Override
    public void onAuthenticationSuccess(HttpServletRequest request,
            HttpServletResponse response, Authentication authentication)
            throws ServletException, IOException {
            ...
        super.setUseReferer(true);
        super.onAuthenticationSuccess(request, response, authentication);
    }

}

now problem of redirect to requested page on success. if i directly refer to any secure url spring redirects me to login page and on successful login to original requested link. but this is not working in case if user had earlier selected remember-me and then closing browser and now requesting direct URL, he is being properly authenticated but instead of redirecting him to requested page spring redirects to /. i have checked log and some spring source code and found it is not able to determine target url.

i have tried to set refer but referer value is null. but one strange thing i have noticed that in spring security configuration if i remove authentication-success-handler from remember-me configuration then it works.

    <remember-me key="jbcpHaverERP" authentication-success-handler-ref="loginSucessHandler"/>

not able to figure out issue. is authentication-success-handler implementation requied to be different for form login and remember-me?

Answer 1

Remember-me differs from form-login in that authentication occurs during the actual request the user makes. For form-login, the user must first be redirected to the login page, submit the login form and after that they are redirected to the original target (which is usually cached in the session). So form-login requires a redirect, whereas remember-me doesn't. With a remember-me request, the user can be authenticated, and the request allowed to proceed without any intervention.

The primary purpose of an AuthenticationSuccessHandler is to control the navigation flow after authentication, so you wouldn't normally use one with remember-me at all. Using SavedRequestAwareAuthenticationSuccessHandler isn't a good idea, as there won't be a saved request available. If there is no saved request, then by default it will perform a redirect to "/" as you have observed.

If all you want is to add some functionality during a remember-me login, then you can implement the AuthenticationSuccessHandler interface directly without performing a redirect or a forward. As I explained above, you can't use the same implementation for form-login, since the current request is the submission of the login form (usually to the URL j_spring_security_check), and not a request to a URL within your application. So you need a redirect for form-login.