Spring Security returns 404 instead of 403 when using @PreAuthorize

After struggling with this for a few days (searching SO for similar questions, doing trial & error), I am tempted to give up…

So the problem is I have a REST service based on Spring Boot using Spring Security and JWT for authentication. Now I want to secure some of the methods to be only called by authorized people using the @PreAuthorize-annotation. This seems to work partly because instead of calling the method Spring returns 404. I would have expected 403.

I have read this SO-question and tried the answers given there, but it did not help. I have moved the @EnableGlobalMethodSecurity(prePostEnabled = true)-Annotation from my SecurityConfiguration to the Application class as suggested elsewhere, still it does not work.

My security configuration looks like this:

@Configuration
@Profile("production")
@EnableWebSecurity
@EnableGlobalMethodSecurity(prePostEnabled = true)
public class SecurityConfiguration extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {

@Value("${adDomain}")
private String adDomain;

@Value("${adUrl}")
private String adUrl;

@Value("${rootDn}")
private String rootDn;

@Value("${searchFilter}")
private String searchFilter;

private final AuthenticationManagerBuilder auth;

private final SessionRepository sessionRepository;

@Autowired
public SecurityConfiguration(AuthenticationManagerBuilder auth, SessionRepository sessionRepository) {
    this.auth = auth;
    this.sessionRepository = sessionRepository;
}

@Override
public void configure(WebSecurity webSecurity) throws Exception
{
    webSecurity
            .ignoring()
            // All of Spring Security will ignore the requests
            .antMatchers("/static/**", "/api/web/logout")
            .antMatchers(HttpMethod.POST, "/api/web/login");
}

@Override
protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
    http.csrf().disable() // Using JWT there is no need for CSRF-protection!
            .authorizeRequests()
            .anyRequest().authenticated()
            .and()
            .addFilter(new JwtAuthorizationFilter(authenticationManagerBean(), sessionRepository));
}

@Bean(name = BeanIds.AUTHENTICATION_MANAGER)
@Override
public AuthenticationManager authenticationManagerBean() throws Exception {
    ActiveDirectoryLdapAuthenticationProvider adProvider =
            new ActiveDirectoryLdapAuthenticationProvider(adDomain, adUrl, rootDn);
    adProvider.setConvertSubErrorCodesToExceptions(true);
    adProvider.setUseAuthenticationRequestCredentials(true);
    adProvider.setSearchFilter(searchFilter);
    adProvider.setUserDetailsContextMapper(new InetOrgPersonContextMapper());
    auth.authenticationProvider(adProvider);
    return super.authenticationManagerBean();
}

}

The controller method looks like this

@RequestMapping(path = "/licenses", method = RequestMethod.GET)
@PreAuthorize("hasRole('ADMIN')")
public ResponseEntity<?> getAllLicenses(@RequestParam("after") int pagenumber, @RequestParam("size") int pagesize
        , @RequestParam("searchText") String searchText) {       
    List<LicenseDTO> result = ...
    return new ResponseEntity<Object>(result, HttpStatus.OK);
}

I am quite sure I am missing something very simple, but I just cannot figure out what.

By the way: if the user requesting the licenses has the ADMIN role everything works as expected, so the problem is not a real 404.

Answer

You need to define the exceptionHandling at security configuration as follows,

@Override
protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
    http.csrf().disable() // Using JWT there is no need for CSRF-protection!
            .authorizeRequests()
            .anyRequest().authenticated()
            .and()
            .exceptionHandling().accessDeniedHandler(new AccessDeniedExceptionHandler())
            .and()
            .addFilter(new JwtAuthorizationFilter(authenticationManagerBean(), sessionRepository));
}

You can define AccessDeniedExceptionHandler class as follows,

public class AccessDeniedExceptionHandler implements AccessDeniedHandler
{
    @Override
    public void handle(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response,
            AccessDeniedException ex) throws IOException, ServletException {
        response.setStatus(HttpStatus.FORBIDDEN);
    }
}