Grails, Spring Security & Keycloak: Forms are submitted as ISO-8859-1 instead of UTF-8

Question

I'm using Keycloak & Spring Security with Grails 4.0.9. with following dependencies

compile group: 'org.keycloak', name: 'keycloak-spring-security-adapter', version: '12.0.2'
compile "org.springframework.security:spring-security-config:4.2.13.RELEASE"
compile "org.springframework.security:spring-security-web:4.2.13.RELEASE"

Any forms that I submit with special characters, ie. ä, will result as 'Ã¶' when I print it out on a html page. The post parameters looks correctly. I also checked Grails settings in application.yml (view/gsp/encoding = utf-8).

My securityConfig looks as following:

    @Override
    protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
        super.configure(http)
        http
            .authorizeRequests()
            .anyRequest().permitAll()
        http.csrf().disable() // disable CSRF since g:forms wouldnt work
    }

If I remove the dependencies, the form submission will work as expected. Thus, I think there is a problem with spring-security.

PS: I checked https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-boot/issues/3912 - but the problem seems to be fixed.

Can you make your sample as minimal as possible in order to confirm that it is Spring Security? Also, are you able to use a supported version of Spring Security (5.2+ at the time of this post) and see if it is still happening? — jzheaux, Jul 26 '21 at 20:20
I removed Keycloak libraries completely and implemented Spring Security "5.3.10.RELEASE" natively. Every form I submit with "ö" will result in "Ã¶". — sullivan, Jul 27 '21 at 17:47
Even if I build a war file and run it locally, the problem still exists. — sullivan, Jul 27 '21 at 17:51

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 28 '21 at 05:14

I came across the solution from https://stackoverflow.com/a/23051264/2027053 and it works. Therefore, I added the CharacterEncodingFilter in my configure method:

import org.springframework.web.filter.CharacterEncodingFilter
import org.springframework.security.web.csrf.CsrfFilter

@Override
protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
    super.configure(http)

    CharacterEncodingFilter filter = new CharacterEncodingFilter()
    filter.setEncoding("UTF-8")
    filter.setForceEncoding(true)
    http.addFilterBefore(filter,CsrfFilter.class)
}

Grails, Spring Security & Keycloak: Forms are submitted as ISO-8859-1 instead of UTF-8

1 Answers1