spring-security/docs/modules/ROOT/pages/features/exploits/http.adoc

[[http]]
= HTTP

All HTTP based communication, including https://www.troyhunt.com/heres-why-your-static-website-needs-https/[static resources], should be protected https://cheatsheetseries.owasp.org/cheatsheets/Transport_Layer_Protection_Cheat_Sheet.html[using TLS].

As a framework, Spring Security does not handle HTTP connections and thus does not provide support for HTTPS directly.
However, it does provide a number of features that help with HTTPS usage.

[[http-redirect]]
== Redirect to HTTPS

When a client uses HTTP, Spring Security can be configured to redirect to HTTPS both xref:servlet/exploits/http.adoc#servlet-http-redirect[Servlet] and xref:reactive/exploits/http.adoc#webflux-http-redirect[WebFlux] environments.

[[http-hsts]]
== Strict Transport Security

Spring Security provides support for xref:features/exploits/headers.adoc#headers-hsts[Strict Transport Security] and enables it by default.

[[http-proxy-server]]
== Proxy Server Configuration

When using a proxy server it is important to ensure that you have configured your application properly.
For example, many applications will have a load balancer that responds to request for https://example.com/ by forwarding the request to an application server at https://192.168.1:8080.
Without proper configuration, the application server will not know that the load balancer exists and treat the request as though https://192.168.1:8080 was requested by the client.

To fix this you can use https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7239[RFC 7239] to specify that a load balancer is being used.
To make the application aware of this, you need to either configure your application server aware of the X-Forwarded headers.
For example Tomcat uses the https://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-8.0-doc/api/org/apache/catalina/valves/RemoteIpValve.html[RemoteIpValve] and Jetty uses https://www.eclipse.org/jetty/javadoc/jetty-9/org/eclipse/jetty/server/ForwardedRequestCustomizer.html[ForwardedRequestCustomizer].
Alternatively, Spring users can leverage https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-framework/blob/v4.3.3.RELEASE/spring-web/src/main/java/org/springframework/web/filter/ForwardedHeaderFilter.java[ForwardedHeaderFilter].

Spring Boot users may use the `server.use-forward-headers` property to configure the application.
See the https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/reference/htmlsingle/#howto-use-tomcat-behind-a-proxy-server[Spring Boot documentation] for further details.