How to configure RSocket security in a Spring Boot application with Spring Security

Question

RSocket seems to be a nice alternative to HTTP/S for microservice to microservice communication. Fortunately Spring Boot already has a smooth integration that eases the configuration of it.

However I am missing information about everything related to RSocket security, both in RSocket and Spring (Boot, Security) documentation.

My questions are:

1) How can we configure RSocket to use TLS (in the context of a Spring Boot application)?

2) Does Spring Security add any additional features to RSocket security? Things that come to my head, imagine we want to propagate a JWT token from one application to another, how could it be passed and validated through an RSocket?

Malia

Answer 1

I recently wrote a post on how to use Spring Security Basic Authentication with RSocket. In for your first question, You can use TcpClientTransport.create(TcpClient.create().port(7000).secure()) when connecting to RSocketServer.

RSocketRequester.builder()
                .dataMimeType(MimeTypeUtils.APPLICATION_JSON)
                .rsocketStrategies(rSocketStrategies)
                .rsocketFactory(clientRSocketFactory -> {
                    clientRSocketFactory.frameDecoder(PayloadDecoder.ZERO_COPY);
                })
                .setupMetadata(credentials, UsernamePasswordMetadata.BASIC_AUTHENTICATION_MIME_TYPE)
                .connect(TcpClientTransport.create(TcpClient.create().port(7000).secure()))
                .block();

And for the second question, When accessing RSocket message endpoints you can use

        BearerTokenMetadata credentials = new BearerTokenMetadata("jwt-token");
        return rSocketRequester
                .route("taxis")
                .metadata(credentials, BearerTokenMetadata.BEARER_AUTHENTICATION_MIME_TYPE)
                .data(new TaxisRequest(type, from, to))
                .retrieveMono(TaxisResponse.class);

And during RSocketServer setup for the PayloadSocketAcceptorInterceptor you can use jwt as below.

    @Bean
    public PayloadSocketAcceptorInterceptor rsocketInterceptor(RSocketSecurity rsocket) {
        rsocket.authorizePayload(authorize -> {
            authorize
                    // must have ROLE_SETUP to make connection
                    .setup().hasRole("SETUP")
                    // must have ROLE_ADMIN for routes starting with "taxis."
                    .route("taxis*").hasRole("ADMIN")
                    // any other request must be authenticated for
                    .anyRequest().authenticated();
            })
            .jwt(Customizer.withDefaults());

            return rsocket.build();
        }

Foursome

Thanks for the detailed and answer and the great post! – Malia

how do you setup sever side ssl config in spring boot rsocket? – Libratory