How to manually set an authenticated user in Spring Security / SpringMVC

Question

After a new user submits a 'New account' form, I want to manually log that user in so they don't have to login on the subsequent page.

The normal form login page going through the spring security interceptor works just fine.

In the new-account-form controller I am creating a UsernamePasswordAuthenticationToken and setting it in the SecurityContext manually:

SecurityContextHolder.getContext().setAuthentication(authentication);

On that same page I later check that the user is logged in with:

SecurityContextHolder.getContext().getAuthentication().getAuthorities();

This returns the authorities I set earlier in the authentication. All is well.

But when this same code is called on the very next page I load, the authentication token is just UserAnonymous.

I'm not clear why it did not keep the authentication I set on the previous request. Any thoughts?

• Could it have to do with session ID's not being set up correctly?
• Is there something that is possibly overwriting my authentication somehow?
• Perhaps I just need another step to save the authentication?
• Or is there something I need to do to declare the authentication across the whole session rather than a single request somehow?

Just looking for some thoughts that might help me see what's happening here.

Answer 1

I couldn't find any other full solutions so I thought I would post mine. This may be a bit of a hack, but it resolved the issue to the above problem:

public void login(HttpServletRequest request, String userName, String password)
{

    UsernamePasswordAuthenticationToken authRequest = new UsernamePasswordAuthenticationToken(userName, password);

    // Authenticate the user
    Authentication authentication = authenticationManager.authenticate(authRequest);
    SecurityContext securityContext = SecurityContextHolder.getContext();
    securityContext.setAuthentication(authentication);

    // Create a new session and add the security context.
    HttpSession session = request.getSession(true);
    session.setAttribute("SPRING_SECURITY_CONTEXT", securityContext);
}