spring-auth-demo/docs/11-spring-security-7-changes.md

11 — What changed in Spring Security 7

← production checklist · next: issuer and audience →

Everything below was hit while building this repository against Spring Security 7.1.1 on Spring Boot 4.1.1, JDK 25. Verified by compiling or by reading real responses, not from release notes alone.

FACTOR_BEARER in your authorities

Every bearer-token authentication now carries an extra authority:

"authorities": ["FACTOR_BEARER", "ROLE_USER", "SCOPE_profile:read"]

It backs the new multi-factor authorization support — AuthorizationManagerFactories.multiFactor(), @EnableMultiFactorAuthentication, and in 7.1 the when / withWhen conditions and MultiFactorCondition.WEBAUTHN_REGISTERED. Harmless until a test asserts an exact authority set, or code assumes every authority starts with ROLE_ or SCOPE_.

resource_metadata in every WWW-Authenticate

WWW-Authenticate: Bearer realm="jwt-auth-demo",
    resource_metadata="http://localhost:8080/.well-known/oauth-protected-resource"

Spring Security 7 adds OAuth2ProtectedResourceMetadataFilter to the resource-server chain — RFC 9728, OAuth 2.0 Protected Resource Metadata. Visible in the resource-server chain and in the entry point's output even on the manual profile, because BearerTokenAuthenticationEntryPoint emits it.

7.1 additionally includes charset in WWW-Authenticate (gh-18755).

NimbusJwtEncoder builders (7.0+) and their method names

NimbusJwtEncoder.withSecretKey(secretKey).algorithm(MacAlgorithm.HS256).build();
NimbusJwtEncoder.withKeyPair(rsaPublic, rsaPrivate).algorithm(SignatureAlgorithm.RS256).build();
NimbusJwtEncoder.withKeyPair(ecPublic, ecPrivate).build();

Two traps:

• the builder method is algorithm(..), not jwsAlgorithm(..) — while the decoder builders use macAlgorithm(..) and signatureAlgorithm(..);
• there is no keyId(..). Set kid through jwkPostProcessor(jwk -> jwk.keyID(..)).

The pre-7.0 form still compiles:

new NimbusJwtEncoder(new ImmutableSecret<>(secretKey));

setJwkSelector(List::getFirst) (6.5+) resolves the "multiple matching JWKs" exception.

Three sibling classes, three packages

org.springframework.security.oauth2.server.resource.web.BearerTokenAuthenticationEntryPoint
org.springframework.security.oauth2.server.resource.web.access.BearerTokenAccessDeniedHandler
org.springframework.security.oauth2.server.resource.web.authentication.BearerTokenAuthenticationFilter

Auto-import will confidently pick the wrong one. This cost a compile cycle here.

Jackson 3

Spring Security 7 moves to Jackson 3 (tools.jackson.*). SecurityJackson2Modules is replaced by SecurityJacksonModules with JsonMapper.Builder. Boot 4.1.1 resolves tools.jackson.core:jackson-databind:3.1.5. If you serialise a SecurityContext — into a session store, a cache, a Redis-backed denylist — that code changes. See the Jackson 2 to 3 migration guide.

Boot 4 test slices moved

@AutoConfigureMockMvc is now org.springframework.boot.webmvc.test.autoconfigure.AutoConfigureMockMvc, in spring-boot-starter-webmvc-test. Security test support is in spring-boot-starter-security-test. spring-boot-starter-test alone no longer suffices. → doc 08

Boot 4.1: SpEL authority extraction

spring:
  security:
    oauth2:
      resourceserver:
        jwt:
          authorities-claim-expressions: "['realm_access']['roles']"
          authority-prefix: "ROLE_"

Mutually exclusive with authorities-claim-name / authorities-claim-delimiter. This is the property-only answer to Keycloak-style nested role claims, which previously needed a custom converter.

csrf.spa() is new in 7.0

.csrf(csrf -> csrf.spa())

One call for CookieCsrfTokenRepository + XorCsrfTokenRequestAttributeHandler + deferred token loading. Checked against the jars: absent from spring-security-config 6.4.7 and 6.5.1, present in 7.0.0. Several guides describe it as a 6.x feature.

Other 7.1 additions worth knowing

• RestClientOpaqueTokenIntrospector (gh-18745) — the RestClient-based replacement for the RestTemplate introspector, for opaque rather than JWT tokens.
• ConditionalAuthorizationManager and AllRequiredFactorsAuthorizationManager.anyOf (gh-18960).
• PreFlightRequestFilter CORS support (gh-18926).
• InetAddressMatcher (gh-18634).
• WebAuthn now publishes authentication events (gh-18113).

Migrating from 6.x

Spring Security's own advice: go to 6.5 first, use its opt-in switches to adopt the 7.0 behaviours one at a time, then upgrade. The 6.5 preparation steps exist precisely so that the 7.0 jump is a version bump rather than a rewrite.

ankurm.com has a dedicated Spring Security 5 → 6 → 7 migration guide.