  Spring security is tremendously popular among practitioners for its ease of
use to secure enterprise applications. In this paper, we study the application
framework misconfiguration vulnerabilities in the light of Spring security,
which is relatively understudied in the existing literature. Towards that goal,
we identify 6 types of security anti-patterns and 4 insecure vulnerable
defaults by conducting a measurement-based approach on 28 Spring applications.
Our analysis shows that security risks associated with the identified security
anti-patterns and insecure defaults can leave the enterprise application
vulnerable to a wide range of high-risk attacks. To prevent these high-risk
attacks, we also provide recommendations for practitioners. Consequently, our
study has contributed one update to the official Spring security documentation
while other security issues identified in this study are being considered for
future major releases by Spring security community.
