Integrating Atlassian Crowd with Spring Boot 2.1.7 via Spring Security - Issues

[Jonathan Turnock]

I have run into some bugs while configuring crowd, this is a topic that I have put off tackling several times because of the amount of people saying it doesn't work with the official atlassian article.

I took on the task, most of it was fine but I think I found a couple of bugs.

1. CrowdSecurityFilter - seems to just outright deny passage even for paths which are permitted. I had to exclude this bean and it was fine, this is annoying because it means the XML provided by atlassian cannot be used as is and I have to pull it into the project and comment out that bean.
2. CrowdAuthenticationProvider - When debugging the auth process, inside the following method the authenticationToken.getDetails() doesn't return null, so it throws a false, which in turn causes the authenticate call to return null.

public boolean supports(AbstractAuthenticationToken authenticationToken) {
    return authenticationToken.getDetails() == null || authenticationToken.getDetails() instanceof CrowdSSOAuthenticationDetails;
}

public Authentication authenticate(Authentication authentication) throws AuthenticationException {
    if (!this.supports(authentication.getClass())) {
        return null;
    } else if (!this.supports((AbstractAuthenticationToken)authentication)) {
        return null;
    } else {
        Authentication authenticatedToken = null;
        if (authentication instanceof UsernamePasswordAuthenticationToken) {
            logger.debug("Processing a UsernamePasswordAuthenticationToken");
            authenticatedToken = this.authenticateUsernamePassword((UsernamePasswordAuthenticationToken)authentication);
        } else if (authentication instanceof CrowdSSOAuthenticationToken) {
            logger.debug("Processing a CrowdSSOAuthenticationToken");
            authenticatedToken = this.authenticateCrowdSSO((CrowdSSOAuthenticationToken)authentication);
        }

        return authenticatedToken;
    }
}

 As a result the UI displays the following:

No AuthenticationProvider found for org.springframework.security.authentication.UsernamePasswordAuthenticationToken

I had to replace the implementation with authenticationToken.getDetails() != null but I am unsure of the intended direction here, going back before version 3 of this library it seems like it was a completely different implementation for this method.

I have written a blog about the topic to provide some more context and a bitbucket repo exists which replicates the issue.

https://fxqlabs.net/display/OSS/2019/08/20/Integrating+Atlassian+Crowd+with+Spring+Boot+via+Spring+Security

https://bitbucket.org/fxqlabs-oss/integrating-atlassian-crowd-with-spring-boot-via-spring/commits/1399518fe0f21f00fe2064991170585ac0bfe314

I would really like to get rid of these hacks to get the platform working because otherwise it's actually a very neat solution.

Thanks

[Graham Bakay]

Update: Atlassian Support has added this bug.

[Jonathan Turnock]

👍

[Graham Bakay]

Hi Jonathan,

Sorry to necro this thread but wowwwww.

Indeed, your solution solves this (to me very glaring) bug.

Have you contacted Atlassian about this? Do you know if there's a Jira issue tracking it? I downloaded Crowd v4.2.2 and it's still there. Just curious if this has been brought to their attention already before I do.

Thanks for doing the legwork on this, too. I was pulling my hair out for a day or so.

—Graham.

[Jonathan Turnock]

Hi Graham,

I didn’t raise anything directly at the time and given atlassian are going into maintenance mode for self hosted apps I’d be surprised if it ever gets fixed tbh. 

feel free to reach out to them however, it’s not ideal is it!

thanks

[Graham Bakay]

They're still developing and supporting Crowd (with their Data Center licencing tier) and we're still married to it because it runs on-prem, so I submitted a support request that should percolate into a bug in their Jira.

I'll update this thread for posterity with the bug key once it's created. Hopefully this helps someone else down the line.

Thanks for tracking it down. A bit of an annoyance to work around it with a subclass, but at least i have springsec working.

Cheers.
—Graham.

[Business Systeme]

Hi Jonathan,

I have these problems too. In one case I see a no provider error, in the other case I see a DAO provider error (password).

Did you find a way to solve your problems? Your documentation link won´t work any more.

I tried your codes from Bitbucket but my error is still the same.

Do you have more information?

I asked the Community too: 

https://community.developer.atlassian.com/t/crowd-login-error-java-lang-unsupportedoperationexception-not-giving-you-the-password/35183

Regards

Uli

[Jonathan Turnock]

Hi Uli, The code from the Bitbucket repo should work ok I seem to have lost that blog however :(

I have updated the repo with a Readme for use without the blog, I have also updated to Crowd 3.7 and tested, all is ok still. I also added the build file to actually create the crowd server in docker from scratch to make it more independent for quickly testing different versions.

https://bitbucket.org/fxqlabs-oss/integrating-atlassian-crowd-with-spring-boot-via-spring/src/master/