Handling security concerns

This section presents the main security challenges in web applications and how to handle them with the Play framework.

Authentication

In the previous chapter, we added a page that showed an auction room for an item. The form to participate in an auction requires users to fill their name and a price for the item. In this section, I propose to restrict auction rooms to authenticated users only. This means that if a non-authenticated user tries to go to an auction room, he is redirected to a login form. Once he is logged in, he is redirected back to the auction room, whose form now has only one field, the bid price, because the username can be retrieved from the user's identity.

To differentiate between identified and non-identified users, we rely on a session mechanism. Once a user is authenticated, he visits the pages of the application on behalf of his identity; two users might not see the same response when they go to the same page. To achieve this in a stateless...