Spring – HTTPS login with Spring Security redirects to HTTP

I also am hosting my Grails app with Spring Security Core 2.0-RC4 on AWS with https and a load balancer, and thanks to spock99 (above) and Ravi L of AWS, I got it working.

I did the following in config.groovy:

    // Required because user auth uses absolute redirects
    grails.serverURL = "http://example.com"

    grails.plugin.springsecurity.secureChannel.definition = [
        '/assets/**':     'ANY_CHANNEL',// make js, css, images available to logged out pages
        '/**':            'REQUIRES_SECURE_CHANNEL',
    ]

    // overriding values in DefaultSecurityConfig.groovy from the SpringSecurityCore 2.0-RC4 
    grails.plugin.springsecurity.secureChannel.useHeaderCheckChannelSecurity = true
    grails.plugin.springsecurity.portMapper.httpPort = 80
    grails.plugin.springsecurity.portMapper.httpsPort = 443

NOTE: The following were not needed in Spring Security Core 2.0-RC4 - they are already in DefaultSecurityConfig.groovy

    secureHeaderName = 'X-Forwarded-Proto'
    secureHeaderValue = 'http'
    insecureHeaderName = 'X-Forwarded-Proto'
    insecureHeaderValue = 'https'

I was getting false 'Unhealthy' readings because hitting '/' returns a 302 redirect to /login/auth, so I added a health() method to HomeController (which I mapped to '/health') for AWS to hit:

    class HomeController {
        @Secured('IS_AUTHENTICATED_FULLY')
        def index() { }

        @Secured('permitAll')
        def health() { render '' }
    }

Key for me was that session cookies were not being handled properly with multiple instance running on the Load Balancer (I did not discover this until setting the minimum instance to 2), so in order for users to be able to log in and stay logged in, I did the following on AWS:

1.  At Services / Elastic Beanstalk / Configuration / Load Balancing 
    a. set Application health check URL: /health
    b. left Session Stickiness: unchecked
2. At Services / EC2 / Load Balancers / Description / Port Configuration:
    For both port 80 (HTTP)  and 443 (HTTPS)
        1. Edit and select 'Enable Application Generated Cookie Stickiness'
        2. Cookie Name: JSESSIONID

I know this post is a year old, but I recently had similar issues and hope that someone might find this useful.

I see you are using a load balancer. You have to do the following:

Step 1

Make sure that port 443 is open on your EC2 instance and not being blocked by a firewall. You can run

sudo netstat -tlnp

on linux to check which ports are open. The output should look something like this:

Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address           Foreign Address         State       PID/Program name
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:22              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      937/sshd
tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:3306          0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      1060/mysqld
tcp6       0      0 :::22                   :::*                    LISTEN      937/sshd
tcp6       0      0 :::443                  :::*                    LISTEN      2798/apache2
tcp6       0      0 :::80                   :::*                    LISTEN      2798/apache2

Step 2

Make sure your security groups are setup as follows:

EC2 (INBOUND)

• HTTP TCP 80 LOAD BALANCER
• HTTPS TCP 443 LOAD BALANCER

Load Balancer (Outbound)

• HTTP TCP 80 EC2 Instance
• HTTPS TCP 443 EC2 Instance

Step 3

Make sure your EC2 instance is listening on port 443 (/etc/apache2/ports.conf) :

Listen 80
Listen 443

If you are using a virtual host, make sure it looks like this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
     DocumentRoot /var/www/html/mysite.com
     ServerName mysite.com
     ServerAlias www.mysite.com
        <Directory /var/www/html/mysite.com>
                AllowOverride All
                RewriteEngine On
                Require all granted
                Options -Indexes +FollowSymLinks
        </Directory>
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost *:443>
     DocumentRoot /var/www/html/mysite.com
     ServerName mysite.com
     ServerAlias www.mysite.com
     SSLEngine on
     SSLCertificateFile /usr/local/ssl/public.crt
     SSLCertificateKeyFile /usr/local/ssl/private/private.key
     SSLCACertificateFile /usr/local/ssl/intermediate.crt
</VirtualHost>

Step 4

Upload your certificate files in .pem format using the following commands:

aws iam upload-server-certificate --server-certificate-name my-server-cert 
--certificate-body file://my-certificate.pem --private-key file://my-private-key.pem 
--certificate-chain file://my-certificate-chain.pem

Step 4

Create a listener on the Load Balancer which has the EC2 instance attached to it. The listener is for HTTPS and port 443. The listener will ask for a certificate and it will have the one you added from the aws cli already listed. If it is not listed, log out of the AWS console and log back in.

After, this, traffic via HTTPS will start flowing to your EC2 instance.

I had similar issues, and posted my question and answer here: HTTPS only works on localhost