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HOME >> COLUMNS

XML Digital Signatures in Mustang

By Allen Hollub

May 15, 2005 — (Page 1 of 3)
This column continues my look at the new features slated for the Java 6 (“Mustang”) release.

The dark underbelly of XML on the Web has always been security, a topic about which most programmers are woefully ignorant. Too often, programmers assume that a firewall will solve all their security problems. Unfortunately, they also look at the firewall as a nuisance, and they’ve worked diligently to make firewalls completely ineffective. (I blame ignorant IT departments who refuse to open up legitimate “holes” in the firewall for this state of affairs.) Vast quantities of network traffic that has nothing to do with serving Web pages now funnel through port 80. It’s as if the firewall isn’t even there.

Returning to XML, an XML-based Web service is really a way to circumvent the firewall by allowing someone from outside to execute code inside your app server via port 80. Once a hacker is in the app server, he or she can wreak havoc. The real vulnerability in most systems is in the code itself, not the means of getting to the code. Hackers exploit bugs.

Though there have been lots of XML security standards in the works, none of them has been sufficiently solid to be put into common use. Since nobody has been rolling his or her own security solutions, Web services have been very vulnerable to attack. The situation is compounded by tools that make XML/SOAP “easy” by automatically generating all the insecure wrapper code that you need to penetrate the firewall. None of this machine-generated code could know about a roll-your-own security system, for example.

To make XML transactions really secure, you need to deal with several aspects of the security equation. The three big ones are confidentiality (encryption), authentication (of both the end user and the server) and access control. All three are complicated by the fact that the Web service may be distributed, and not all parts of the service may be under your control. (For example, you may be using a third-party credit-card processing service.)

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