For DSpace 7 the REST authentication has been rewritten to use JSON Web tokens instead of Tomcat session ID's. This was done to support stateless sessions. The implementation still uses Spring Security similar to DSpace 6.

Authenticate

To authenticate yourself, you have to send a POST request to the /api/authn/login endpoint with the following parameters:

Example call with curl:

# Login: test@dspace.com , Password: p4ssword
curl -v -X POST --data "user=test%40dspace.com&password=p4ssword" "https://{dspace.server.url}/api/authn/login" -H "X-XSRF-TOKEN: {csrf-token}"

NOTE: a login request first requires obtaining a valid CSRF token from the REST API. See https://github.com/DSpace/RestContract/blob/main/csrf-tokens.md

This call will return a JWT (JSON Web Token) in the response in the Authorization header according to the bearer scheme. This token has to be used in subsequent calls to provide your authentication details. For example:

curl -v "https://{dspace.server.url}/api/core/items" -H "Authorization: Bearer eyJhbG...COdbo"

See also https://github.com/DSpace/RestContract/blob/main/authentication.md

Login using the HAL-browser

The HAL browser has been extended to provide a login form and to authenticate subsequent requests. You can find the login form in the top navigation menu where you can enter your credentials. After supplying valid credentials the token will be stored in a cookie and every request will get this token from the cookie and send it in the authorization header.

Pass the token

For DSpace to detect the token it has to be send in the Authorization header with the Bearer schema, that is prepend the token with "Bearer" then leave a space and paste the token.

Keep in mind, all modifying requests (POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE) also require sending a separate CSRF Token in the X-XSRF-TOKEN  header. See https://github.com/DSpace/RestContract/blob/main/csrf-tokens.md

Authentication Status

The authentication status can be checked by sending your received token to the status endpoint in the Authorization header:

curl -v "https://{dspace.server.url}/api/authn/status" -H "Authorization: Bearer eyJhbG...COdbo"

This will return the authentication status, E.G.:

{
  "okay" : true,
  "authenticated" : true,
  "type" : "status",
  "_links" : {
    "eperson" : {
      "href" : "http://localhost:8080/dspace7-rest/api/eperson/epersons/2245f2c5-1bed-414b-a313-3fd2d2ec89d6"
    }
  },
  "_embedded" : {
    "eperson" : {
      "uuid" : "2245f2c5-1bed-414b-a313-3fd2d2ec89d6",
      "email" : "test@dspace.com",
      ...
      }
    }
  }
}

Fields

Logout

To logout and invalidate the token, send the token in the Authorization header with the bearer scheme to the following endpoint:

/api/authn/logout

E.G.

# NOTE: Logout must be done via POST
curl -v -X POST "https://{dspace.server.url}/api/authn/logout" -H "Authorization: Bearer eyJhbG...COdbo" -H "X-XSRF-TOKEN: {csrf-token}"

This will log the user out on every device or browser.

See also https://github.com/DSpace/RestContract/blob/main/authentication.md

JSON Web Token

The authentication token is a JSON Web Token (JWT) and is base64url encoded. For more information about JWT see this page: https://jwt.io/introduction/

By default the JWT token will have a couple of claims already, which we can see if we decode the token:

Add extra claims

To add a custom additional claim, you should implement a Spring bean which implement the JWTClaimProvider interface. Spring will scan for beans implementing that interface and use them to automatically add new claims to the tokens.

The JWTClaimProvider interface requires three methods to be implemented:

getKey(): String  

  This method should return a string, this string will be used as key for the claim (for example "eid" for the eperson id claim)

getValue(Context, HttpServletRequest): Object

  This method should return the value of the claim, This can be any object, as long as it is Serialisable.

parseClaim(Context, HttpServletRequest, JWTClaimSet)

  This method should parse the claim when someone presents a token. In this method you should handle what has to happen with it (for example setting special groups on the context object)

NOTE: add @Component to your ClaimProviders so Spring can find them.

Refresh Token

Tokens are only valid for a configurable amount of time (see below). When a token is about to expire (the timestamp provided in the exp claim), you can request a new token with a new expiration time (by default 30 minutes). To do so send the token to the login endpoint without "user" and "password" parameters. As a response you'll get a new freshly issued token (again in the Authorization header of the response).

E.G.

curl -v "http://{spring-rest.url}/api/authn/login" -H "Authorization: Bearer eyJhbG...COdbo"

Which will return something like this:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Authorization: Bearer edoDfG...S0df

Now you can use this new token to continue making authenticated requests.

Configuration properties

The new stateless authentication introduced a few new properties that can be configured, these can all be found under modules/authentication.cfg:

Running DSpace in a clustered setup

One of the biggest advantages of this stateless authentication is that we can scale DSpace horizontally by running multiple instances of DSpace side-by-side without complex configuration. Each node in the cluster will be able to understand the tokens. To do so a few properties have to be configured:

• jwt.token.secret: This property has to be the same on every instance of DSpace. It's best to choose a long, non trivial secret for extra security. Remember that properties can also be set through environment variables.
• if jwt.encryption.enabled is set to true then jwt.encryption.secret also has to be configured and the same key has to be used on every instance.

Construction of signing key

The signing key used to sign and validate tokens is unique per eperson session. The signing key is constructed by

• a random generated salt per user + 
• the server jwt.token.secret or a random one if empty +

The session salt is saved in the EPerson table in the database and is used for:

• Invalidating tokens: When someone logs out the salt will be removed from the database, so that tokens won't be valid anymore since the sign key can't be constructed anymore.
• Making sure the signing key has a valid length: The salt is always 32 bytes and the key to sign is required to be >= 32 bytes

As long as a user refreshes his tokens before they expire, the session salt will not change. Once all tokens are expired and have not been refreshed (or if the user called the logout endpoint), the session salt will change on the next login.