Developer Adds Role-Based Access Control to Spring Boot App Using Spring Security

A backend developer implemented role-based access control (RBAC) in a Spring Boot application using Spring Security, assigning users either a ROLE_USER or ROLE_ADMIN authority at registration. Regular users can only access their own profile data, while admins can retrieve the full list of registered users. Spring Security's configuration layer enforces these restrictions, returning a 403 error if an unauthorized user attempts to reach a protected endpoint, without any request reaching the controller. Authentication currently runs over HTTP Basic on a stateless setup, with JWT planned as the next step. The developer noted that a key debugging hurdle was ensuring authority strings matched Spring Security's expected ROLE_ prefix convention, which fails silently when mismatched.