Description

Applications using @AuthorizeReturnObject or the Spring Security produced AuthorizationAdvisorProxyFactory @Bean to wrap objects may not have all security advice applied.

When method security advice is not applied, it means that annotations like @PreFilter and @PreAuthorize may take no affect on these wrapped objects.

Note that this does not impact any @Beans that use Spring Security's method security advice.

For this to impact an application, all of the following need to be true:

• AnnotationAwareAspectJAutoProxyCreator must be the auto proxy creator being used to create proxies; this can either be done declaratively by your application or enabled via @EnableAspectJAutoProxy or enabled by Spring Boot by virtue of using spring-aspects or a starter that uses spring-aspects
• The application must have at least one FactoryBean present in the application context
• The application must enable method security with @EnableMethodSecurity
• The application must be wrapping objects using the @AuthorizeReturnObject annotation or the AuthorizationAdvisorProxyFactory @Bean produced by Spring Security
• The application must be using @PreFilter, @PostFilter, @PreAuthorize, or @PostAuthorize on those wrapped objects

If all of these are true, then some of the method security advice may not be applied to the objects wrapped by @AuthorizeReturnObject or AuthorizationAdvisorProxyFactory.

Applications where any of the following are true are not impacted:

• The application is not using @PreFilter, @PostFilter, @PreAuthorize, or @PostAuthorize on any wrapped objects
• The application is not using @EnableMethodSecurity to enable method security
• The application is not using @AuthorizeReturnObject or the AuthorizationAdvisorProxyFactory @Bean produced by Spring Security
• The application doesn't have any FactoryBeans
• The application is not using AnnotationAwareAspectJAutoProxyCreator for auto-proxy creation

Affected Spring Products and Versions

This affects the following Spring Security versions:

• 6.3.0 and 6.3.1

Mitigation

Users of affected versions should upgrade to the corresponding fixed version.

No other mitigation steps are necessary.

Credit

This issue was responsibly reported by Josh Cummings.

References

• Spring Security Reference - https://docs.spring.io/spring-security/reference/servlet/authorization/method-security.html#authorize-object

History

• 2024-08-19 - Initial Report Published