Slashdot Mirror
Web Services - More Secure or Less?
visibleman asks: "I have recently moved onto a project which is based around web services and SOAP and have, therefore, been doing some reading on those subjects. One thing which keeps coming up is that web services are claimed to be more secure than CORBA and RMI because it means drilling less holes through firewalls. If I was a firewall administrator (I am not, I am a developer) I would want to know that if I open up a port (port 80 for instance) I know what kind of requests are coming through it. Since SOAP is essentially a mechanism for sending functional requests over a port specified for web page requests this would make me nervous. My preference would be that requests for web pages go over one port and requests to run services go over another - favouring an IIOP solution. Am I off my trolley or would other Slashdotters have similar fears?"
The security or insecurity of a service has nothing to do with whether or not the request can be brokered by a webserver. All this really accomplishes is setting up the webserver as a massive single point of failure, and making it harder to audit what services a particular box is running.
When you use the paradigm that each service has an associated port, you can be sure that nobody is running any unknown services merely by blocking ports. When everything is on port 80, the firewall becomes much less useful.
I don't think it matters which you use. Allowing people to make functional requests to programs inside your firewall is just as much of a security risk either way. I actually think the function call model is an evil, misleading, broken way of thinking about messages over networks, but like several other practices, people seem bound and determined that this is the way to do things. If you must do this evil thing, it probably doesn't matter (from a security standpoint) how you do it.
The only thing you really gain by not going through port 80 is that the attacker theoretically won't be able to break into your web server software by breaking into your RPC software, but I wouldn't count on that being the case. Besides, either way, they've gotten onto your box, does it really matter how?
Holes in firewalls aren't intrinsically bad things. It's what they lead to that's the problem.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Off the trolley, I'd say. It's a fundamental and unavoidable weakness of packet firewalls that they filter ports, not services. It's completely naive to believe that port 80 will always be harmless HTTP traffic. ANYTHING can run on port 80, and there's nothing you can do against it unless you have absolute control over all machines behind the firewall.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
I totally agree with the idea that separate services receive separate ports. This makes a lot of sense for security, in that you can track excatly what SOAP requests are being made to your servers and allows you to shut them off if necessary. Going over Port 80 makes it virtually impossible for a company to disable a SOAP service from the firewall without expensive packet inspection at the firewall. The drawback that I can see with not going over port 80 is trying to get the Networking group to punch a hole in the firewall for that port. A separate port also makes things more secure in that if you want to use SOAP internally to your network, you don't allow other people to easily send SOAP requests from the external network. We use CORBA at my company and we don't open the ports to the open internet, but we do keep them open on internal firewalls. If hackers knew that we had CORBA servers, they could inspect what services we had and possibly do malicious harm.
Separate but equal is what I say.
I am a mean old network admin for a software consultancy company. I can therefore understand mean old network admins.
The problem with big companies who give us big bucks to develop web apps is that the firewall/security teams are totally unresponsive to requests from development teams. A lot of firewall teams act as if nothing is ever up for discussion, and 80 and 443 are all that will ever be. System security would be a lot stronger if the security teams worked along with development teams, but instead a ton of security teams have a fortress mentality, for both system security, and their own interactions - locking themselves away from contact. As a result, everything and anything will eventually be pushed thru 80 and 443.
ostiguy