15.8. SSL Security

Seam includes basic support for serving sensitive pages via the HTTPS protocol. To configure this, specify a scheme for the page in pages.xml. The following example shows how the view /login.xhtml can be configured to use HTTPS:

<page view-id="/login.xhtml" scheme="https"/>

This configuration automatically extends to both s:link and s:button JSF controls, which (when specifying the view) will render the link under the correct protocol. Based on the previous example, the following link will use the HTTPS protocol because /login.xhtml is configured to use it:

<s:link view="/login.xhtml" value="Login"/>

If a user browses directly to a view with the incorrect protocol, a redirect is triggered, and the same view will be reloaded with the correct protocol. For example, browsing to a scheme="https" page with HTTP triggers a redirect to the same page using HTTPS.

You can also configure a default scheme for all pages. This is useful if you only want to use HTTPS for a few pages. If no default scheme is specified, the current scheme will be used. So, once the user accesses a page requiring HTTPS, then HTTPS continues to be used after the user has navigated to other non-HTTPS pages. This is good for security, but not for performance. To define HTTP as the default scheme, add this line to pages.xml:

<page view-id="*" scheme="http" />

If none of the pages in your application use HTTPS, you need not define a default scheme.

You can configure Seam to automatically invalidate the current HTTP session each time the scheme changes. To do so, add this line to components.xml:

<web:session invalidate-on-scheme-change="true"/>

This option offers more protection from session ID sniffing and sensitive data leakage from pages using HTTPS to pages using HTTP.

 
<pages xmlns="http://jboss.com/products/seam/pages"
       xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
       xsi:schemaLocation="http://jboss.com/products/seam/pages http://jboss.com/products/seam/pages-2.2.xsd"
       no-conversation-view-id="/home.xhtml"
       login-view-id="/login.xhtml" http-port="8080" https-port="8443">