Steven Levine
Steven Levine
3 min read

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This is going to be the first in a series of posts discussing potential ways of securing bi-directional RESTful based HTTP services. For this series we are going to make the requirements quite simple, namely, “secure” simply means the caller of the service is authorized to invoke it. Lets assume that this solution is being deployed along with a simple IP addresses restriction mechanism. Since IP address’s can easily be spoofed, this solution is the next level of defense to ensure the identity of the caller.

There are many different potential solutions to this problem, but for this series, we are going to focus on the simplest solution which is to add a security hash to each service call. This post assumes you understand how to secure B2B communications with the use of a security hash. If you need a refresher, please refer to this post on the subject.

Since we know the design for securing our communications, we need to decide on an implementation. The first potential implementation we are going to examine is adding a “security hash” to the XML payload for each service call.

The embellished XML payload would look like:

<someEntity>
    <hash>4723af11bef05fc6207bd22cd163d9db</hash>
    <fieldOne> ... </fieldOne>
    <fieldTwo> ... </fieldTwo>
</someEntity>

with the “hash” field (line 2) representing the security hash.

The interface of the SomeEntity service, would look like:

public interface SomeEntityService {
    public void updateSomeEntity(SomeEntity entity, int id) throws SecurityException;
}

with an implementation that looks like:

@Path("/services")
public class SomeEntityServiceImpl {

    @PUT
    @Path("/someEntity/{id}")
    @Consumes("text/xml")
    public void updateSomeEntity(SomeEntity entity,
                    @PathParam("id") int id)
                        throws SecurityException {
        if (validateHash(entity))
            dao.saveOrupdate(entity)
        else
            throw new SecurityException("Not Authorized");
    }
}

With the actual HTTP Client call looking like:

PUT http://blah.com/services/someEntity/226 HTTP/1.1
Accept: text/xml
Content-Type: text/xml
User-Agent: Jakarta Commons-HttpClient/3.1
Host: somehost:port
Content-Length: 380
<someEntity>
    <hash>4723af11bef05fc6207bd22cd163d9db</hash>
    <fieldOne> fieldOne </fieldOne>
    <fieldTwo> fieldTwo </fieldTwo>
</someEntity>

There you have it, our first potential solution to the problem. We now need to examine if this solution is correct, and if it is, is it elegant?

First things first, is it correct? If you trace through the code, you can see that before the service makes a call to the DAO, it checks to verify the validity of the hash field (line 10). If the hash it is not valid, it will throw an Exception, which in turn would return a 401 to the user. It would not be possible for a client to access the DAO without having the proper hash as part of the XML Payload.

Even though this approach would perform as expected, it has two main issues, the first being it mixes concerns. What we mean by mixes concerns is it mixes business logic with security logic. This is a standard problem that applies to layered architectures. The main side effect of this problem is it makes the code very difficult to reuse. Lets me demonstrate this with a simple code fragment:

// Code in a Web Controller class somewhere
try {
    someEntitySvc.updateSomeEntity(entity);
} catch (SecurityException e) {
    // Nothing we can do... We don't have the hash???
}

As you can see from this simple example the implementation of the service is not generic enough to be usable by a Controller in the Web Tier. Firstly, even if the Web Tier knew about he hash, the code becomes polluted with Exception handling for an Exception that is not applicable to this client. Secondly, the Web Tier simply doesn’t have any knowledge of the hash, and putting logic here to generate the hash just to use the service would not make any sense from a design perspective.

The second issue with this approach is the fact that you can only apply it to Http methods that accept a payload. What about methods that do not accept a Payload, I.e., GET? To make this work for the GET method, we would have to pollute our GET method implementation with a @Consumes(“text/xml”) tag, which functionally would work, but from a API design perspective, it is quite ugly. As a consumer of a GET method, all you need to know is the id of the entity you wish to “get”. Adding an XML payload for “security” purposes is a bad and cumbersome design.

With all that being said, it looks like this is not the best solution to the problem. Stay tuned for part two of this series where we will discuss a more elegant approach to solving this problem.