I used Spring and Apache CXF to create a REST webservices application. I’m using x.509 certificates to authenticate the users, and then a custom authorization service to get all of the user groups and details. I’ve implemented a custom UserDetailsService that extracts the user information and populates a UserDetails object. Part of the process of populating this object involves a request to the corporate authorization service. The authorization service is unfortunately a proprietary system, but at least they provide a Java API. The authorization service, among other things, returns a list of groups that the user belongs to.
I’m still in the development stage, but my observations so far seem to indicate that the UserDetailsService is called once upon initial connection. Then each request uses a cached authorization object.
So my question and potential problem are this… Corporate policy states that applications are only allowed to cache the users authorization details for a set period of time. So, how long does Spring keep these UserDetails objects cached before refreshing them? And, how can I control this cache time to make sure I comply with policy?
There was a ticket submitted for something similar to this request:
The advice in the ticket is to create your own filter than periodically sets the Authentication.setAuthenticated property to false, forcing a look up of the user. You might be able to achieve the same by setting a smaller session timeout