Integrating AWS Cognito as an Identity Provider with Spring Boot & Terraform

User authentication and authorization are essential to web applications. AWS Cognito provides a scalable and secure solution for managing user identities and authentication in web applications. In this article, we'll explore how to integrate AWS Cognito as an identity provider with a Spring Boot application and how to write it as Infrastructure as Code with Terraform.

About Cognito

Amazon Cognito is an AWS fully managed service. It enables you to perform user registration, sign-in, and access control to applications, with multi-factor authentication option, identity federation with social and enterprise identity providers feature and user directory management.

Example of usage :

Prerequisites

You will need the following tools to settle the things properly :

• An AWS account
• A Spring Boot application
• AWS CLI installed and configured to acces your AWS account
• AWS SDK for Java dependency in your dependency manager
• Terraform installed and configured.

Set up AWS Cognito User Pool

First, we have to create the User Pool in Cognito. Let's use Terraform to build this.

• Create a new directory for your Terraform configuration and create a main.tf file inside it.
• Add the following Terraform configuration to your main.tf:

provider "aws" {
  region = "eu-west-1"  # Replace with your preferred AWS region
}

resource "aws_cognito_user_pool" "user_pool" {
  name = "my-user-pool"
  alias_attributes = ["email"]
  auto_verified_attributes = ["email"]
  username_attributes = ["email"]
  admin_create_user_config {
    allow_admin_create_user_only = false
    invite_message_template {
      email_message = "Your username is {username} and temporary password is {####}."
      email_subject = "Your temporary password"
      sms_message = "Your username is {username} and temporary password is {####}."
    }
  }
  schema {
    attribute_data_type = "String"
    developer_only_attribute = false
    mutable = true
    name = "email"
    required = true
    string_attribute_constraints {
      max_length = "2048"
      min_length = "0"
    }
  }
}

resource "aws_cognito_user_pool_client" "user_pool_client" {
  name = "my-app-client"
  user_pool_id = aws_cognito_user_pool.example.id
  allowed_oauth_flows = ["code"]
  allowed_oauth_scopes = ["openid"]
  allowed_oauth_flows_user_pool_client = true
  explicit_auth_flows = ["ALLOW_USER_PASSWORD_AUTH"]
  generate_secret = false
}

resource "aws_cognito_user_group" "user_group" {
  name        = "my-user-group"
  user_pool_id = aws_cognito_user_pool.example.id
  description = "My user group description"
}

output "user_pool_id" {
  value = aws_cognito_user_pool.example.id
}

• Run terraform init and terraform apply to create the AWS Cognito User Pool. Replace the AWS region and names.
• After creating the User Pool, note the User Pool ID for later configuration

Configure Spring Boot Application

In your Spring Boot application, you need to add the necessary dependencies and configure the Cognito identity provider.

Add the AWS SDK for Java and Spring Security dependencies to your pom.xml:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.amazonaws</groupId>
    <artifactId>aws-java-sdk-cognitoidentityprovider</artifactId>
    <version>1.11.934</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-security</artifactId>
</dependency>

Configure Cognito in your application.properties or application.yml:

spring.security.oauth2.client.registration.cognito.client-id=<client-id>
spring.security.oauth2.client.registration.cognito.client-secret=<client-secret>
spring.security.oauth2.client.registration.cognito.scope=openid
spring.security.oauth2.client.provider.cognito.issuer-uri=https://cognito-idp.<aws-region>.amazonaws.com/<user-pool-id>

Replace client-id, client-secret, aws-region, and user-pool-id with your AWS Cognito settings.

Register / Login a User

We'll need a controller to register / login users :

@RestController
@RequestMapping("/api/user")
public class UserController {

    @Autowired
    private UserService userService;

    @PostMapping("/register")
    public ResponseEntity<String> registerUser(@RequestBody UserRegistrationRequest userRequest) {
        try {
            userService.registerUser(userRequest); // Register user with Cognito
            return ResponseEntity.ok("User registered successfully.");
        } catch (Exception e) {
            return ResponseEntity.badRequest().body("Error registering user: " + e.getMessage());
        }
    }

    @PostMapping("/login")
    public ResponseEntity<String> loginUser(@RequestBody UserLoginRequest userRequest) {
        if (userService.loginUser(userRequest)) { // Login user with Cognito
            return ResponseEntity.ok("User logged in successfully.");
        } else {
            return ResponseEntity.badRequest().body("Invalid username or password.");
        }
    }
}

And here is the service that implements register and login :

@Service
public class UserService {

    @Autowired
    private AmazonCognitoIdentityProvider cognitoIdentityProvider;

    public void registerUser(UserRegistrationRequest userRequest) {
        try {
            // Prepare user's attributes
            List<AttributeType> userAttributes = new ArrayList<>();
            userAttributes.add(new AttributeType().withName("email").withValue(userRequest.getEmail()));
            // Prepare the request
            AdminCreateUserRequest createUserRequest = new AdminCreateUserRequest()
                .withUserPoolId("cognito-userpool-id") // use environment variable
                .withUsername(userRequest.getUsername())
                .withUserAttributes(userAttributes)
                .withTemporaryPassword(userRequest.getPassword())
                .withDesiredDeliveryMediums("EMAIL");

            // Use Cognito API
            UserType newUser = cognitoIdentityProvider.adminCreateUser(createUserRequest);

            // Add the user to a group
            cognitoIdentityProvider.adminAddUserToGroup(new AdminAddUserToGroupRequest()
                    .withGroupName("yourGroupName")
                    .withUserPoolId("cognito-userpool-id") // use environment variable
                    .withUsername(userRequest.getUsername()));

        } catch (Exception e) {
            // Handle register errors
            throw new RuntimeException("Error registering user : " + e.getMessage(), e);
        }
    }

    public boolean loginUser(UserLoginRequest userRequest) {
        try {
            AdminInitiateAuthRequest authRequest = new AdminInitiateAuthRequest()
                .withUserPoolId("cognito-userpool-id") // use environment variable
                .withClientId("cognito-client-id") // use environment variable
                .withAuthFlow(AuthFlowType.ADMIN_NO_SRP_AUTH)
                .withAuthParameters(Collections.singletonMap("USERNAME", userRequest.getUsername()))

            AdminInitiateAuthResponse authResponse = cognitoIdentityProvider.adminInitiateAuth(authRequest);
            if (ChallengeNameType.PASSWORD_VERIFIER.toString().equals(authResponse.getChallengeName())) {
                return true;
            }

        } catch (Exception e) {
            // Handle login errors
            return false;
        }
        return false; 
    }
}

Manage permissions with Spring Security

Create a custom UserDetails service that loads user information from Cognito. Here's a sample implementation :

import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Value;
import org.springframework.security.core.userdetails.UserDetails;
import org.springframework.security.core.authority.SimpleGrantedAuthority;
import org.springframework.security.core.userdetails.User;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Service;

import com.amazonaws.services.cognitoidp.AWSCognitoIdentityProvider;
import com.amazonaws.services.cognitoidp.model.AdminInitiateAuthRequest;
import com.amazonaws.services.cognitoidp.model.AdminInitiateAuthResult;

@Service
public class CognitoUserDetailsService {

    @Value("${cognito.user.pool.id}")
    private String userPoolId;

    @Value("${cognito.client.id}")
    private String clientId;

    private final AWSCognitoIdentityProvider cognitoIdentityProvider;

    public CognitoUserDetailsService(AWSCognitoIdentityProvider cognitoIdentityProvider) {
        this.cognitoIdentityProvider = cognitoIdentityProvider;
    }

    public UserDetails loadUserByUsername(String username, String password) {
        AdminInitiateAuthRequest authRequest = new AdminInitiateAuthRequest()
            .withAuthFlow("ADMIN_NO_SRP_AUTH")
            .withAuthParameters(
                "USERNAME", username,
                "PASSWORD", password
            )
            .withUserPoolId(userPoolId)
            .withClientId(clientId);

        AdminInitiateAuthResult authResult = cognitoIdentityProvider.adminInitiateAuth(authRequest);

        // Check the authentication result
        if ("SUCCESS".equals(authResult.getAuthenticationResult().getAuthenticationResultCode())) {
            // Authentication is successful, create UserDetails
            String sub = authResult.getAuthenticationResult().getSub();
            String email = authResult.getAuthenticationResult().getUsername();

            // You can retrieve additional user attributes as needed

            return new User(sub, username, 
                true, true, true, true,
                new SimpleGrantedAuthority("ROLE_USER")
            );
        } else {
            // Handle authentication failure
            throw new AuthenticationException("Authentication failed");
        }
    }
}

Secure your endpoints by adding @PreAuthorize annotations to your controller methods:

@RestController
@RequestMapping("/api")
public class MyController {

    @GetMapping("/secured")
    @PreAuthorize("hasRole('ROLE_USER')")
    public String securedEndpoint() {
        return "This is a secured endpoint!";
    }
}

Test the Integration

Now you can test the integration. I recommend Postman to do it. Follow the steps :

• Build and run your Spring Boot app
• Authenticate with email/password on http://localhost:8080/api/user/login - POST

• Interact with secured routes of your API providing the token you recieved from login response

Conclusion

You're now able to rely on a serverless, highly scalable Identity Provider thanks to AWS that can be sourced with Terraform. Cognito is very powerful since it enables you to have your own identity provider but also to federate identities from others.