Authorization

In the context of web development, authorization refers to the process of determining what actions an authenticated user is allowed to perform on a given resource. It involves controlling access to specific functionalities, data, or endpoints based on the user's role, permissions, or other attributes.

Authorization plays a critical role in ensuring that sensitive information and functionality are protected from unauthorized access.

When building applications with Spring Security, there are several mechanisms available for implementing authorization:

1. Role-based Authorization: This mechanism assigns specific roles to users and defines the actions those roles are allowed to perform. For example, an application might have roles like ADMIN, USER, and GUEST, each with different levels of access.

2. Permission-based Authorization: With this mechanism, permissions are granted to individual users or user groups. Permissions specify the actions that a user can perform on specific resources. An example of a permission could be READ, WRITE, DELETE, etc.

3. Attribute-based Authorization: This mechanism uses attributes associated with a user, such as user profile data or custom attributes defined by the application, to make authorization decisions. These attributes can include properties like user location, organization, or group membership.

It's important to carefully design and implement the authorization mechanism based on the requirements of your application and the security needs. A combination of these mechanisms can also be used to achieve more fine-grained access control.

Let's take a look at an example of role-based authorization using Spring Security:

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