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?"

Comments

The tendancy to run everything on port80

[mosch]

It's a new trend, run everything on port 80 so your network admin has less to worry about, but that whole concept is a steaming pile of shit.

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.

Re:The tendancy to run everything on port80

[xyzzy]

Exactly, there has been much gnashing of teeth on the xml-dist-app list about this (a SOAP standardization list).

Although SOAP is bound to HTTP, there is no requirement that you use port 80 -- it's just a well-known HTTP port. As long as the people who need to use your service agree to it, you can use port 12345 if you want. If you are really paranoid, you should be running HTTP over something more secure, like a VPN between you and the service requestor, and not the public (great unwashed) internet.

Re:The tendancy to run everything on port80

[mikeee]

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

Ah ha! Pronoun trouble!

Unfortunately, you can only be sure that nobody is running any unknown services if they use the paradigm that each service has an associated port. Some fool rigs up a VPN layered over HTTPS or DNS, and what good is your firewall then?

In some ways, SOAP's obvious security problem is better; at least it's clear you're screwed.

Solving this correctly is a very hard problem.

Re:The tendancy to run everything on port80

[Thomas Charron]

SOAP is NOT bound to HTTP by any means. It is the most popular implementation of the transport layer, but it can, just as I'm looking at now, go thru other transports, such as an SSL socket connection.

Re:The tendancy to run everything on port80

[KyleCordes]

It's not about security, it's about the adminstrative effort of getting a firewall configuration change made in a large organization. In short, it's really hard to do.

Here's a purposely oversimplified and perhaps harsh explanation:

Simplisting firewall adminstrators don't care what you send over the network, as long as it's on port 80. More sophisticated adminstrators also insist that it's HTTP. Even more sophisticated ones inspect in more detail, such as checking to see if files transferred have viruses in them.

It's only a matter of time before firewall adminstrators notice that SOAP requests are really RPC calls, and block them by default - then we will all be back to having to get specific configuration changes done to let apps work over the firewall. We won't want to do that for the same reasons we don't want to try to convince someone that it's OK to open a port.

I predict that there will therefore be a way developed to wrap SOAP not only in HTTP, but in HTML. The XML SOAP request could sit inside of simple HTML wrapper tags; this would let it go through the likely block-by-default of SOAP traffic.

From a security standpoint

[Omnifarious]

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.

Re:From a security standpoint

[kaisyain]

The document you reference has no explanation about why the function call model is evil, misleading, or broken. All you do is put forward a short argument that it more tightly couples endpoints than exchanging XML documents and that it is lower performance than dumping raw memory.

That is hardly reason for calling it evil.

To call it misleading you would need to provide an argument for why the function call paradigm makes sense when both program components are on the local machine but not when they are distributed. Why should that make a difference? Why should I care where the other end of my transaction be located?

It seems your arguments have more to do with current implementations than any morality inherent in the function call paradigm. I notice that your own alternative is written in C++, which uses the function call paradigm rather than the obviously more efficient, correct, and aesthetically pleasing message passing paradigm.

Re:From a security standpoint

[Omnifarious]

The document you reference has no explanation about why the function call model is evil, misleading, or broken. All you do is put forward a short argument that it more tightly couples endpoints than exchanging XML documents and that it is lower performance than dumping raw memory.

I also complain a lot about latency, and I should complain about the lack of a shared address space, which leads to even more latency. That's the biggest issue. The function call model encourages you to ignore unavoidable latency in network messages. It's a fine model for things within the same process, but latency makes it misleading and evil for network messages.

To call it misleading you would need to provide an argument for why the function call paradigm makes sense when both program components are on the local machine but not when they are distributed. Why should that make a difference? Why should I care where the other end of my transaction be located?

Because, when it's located far away, you have several issues to contend with. First, a function call normally has a latency in the nanosecond range. A network message over the Internet normally has a latency in the millisecond range. Even LAN messages have a latency in the 100s of microsecond range. That's at least 4-5 orders of magnitude (base 10) difference. That's gigantically huge. Yet, it sits there in your program looking like an innocent function call that you'd normally expect to extract an overhead of a few nanseconds.

The other problem is that you don't have very much control over the state of the other program, especially if someone else wrote it. You're essentially introducing close state dependencies between programs that are largely unrelated, and several milliseconds apart. There is nothing _inherent_ about the function call model that forces you to introduce these dependencies, but everything that everybody knows about programming causes you to make certain assumptions about function calls that just aren't true for network messages, especially between largely unrelated programs.

RPC is evil because it hides those essential differences from you.

Re:From a security standpoint

[Chris Parrinello]

I find it amusing that what you call "evil" is the reason why RPC and Corba/IIOP are they way they are. They're hiding the fact that the method call you make might be in process or might be on a remote machine.

"The other problem is that you don't have very much control over the state of the other program, especially if someone else wrote it."

And with SOAP and XML, you have total control over the remote program? Having "loosely coupled" "general" SOAP messages won't solve incorrect implementations of the remote service.

Re:From a security standpoint

[Omnifarious]

Does a call that results in a bunch of SOAP formatted XML being put on the wire look like a function call or not? Does that function call have arguments that mirror the data stuck on the wire or not? If the answer is yes, then SOAP is designed to encapsulate a function call, and is evil.

Overestimating Firewalls.

[-brazil-]

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.

Firewalling & administration

[BlackSol]

I agree with you, the seperation of the ports is more secure due to the fact you need to do less filtering to monitor the incoming requests. However this assumes a competent administrator setting up the firewall, and your code is secure.

Forcing requests to utilize web services is an easier security model. Singular port monitoring is required and ddos, proper request structure, overflows and the like are handled by the web server, thus abstracted from your application layer and upgradable with less affect on your development. Also its assumed you are using a professional level web server (Apache, Iplanet, NES, or even IIS), meaning a greater user base resulting in problems getting found quicker and fixed faster.

Separate Ports for Separate Functions

[digital_freedom]

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.

SOAP

[Jon Peterson]

Hi,

SOAP is transport independant. That's one of its (theoretical) virtues. You can implement SOAP over SMTP, HTTP, whatever.

Practically, it does seem fair to say that HTTP is what an awful lot of SOAP tools are going to be expecting, and given that SOAP is still quite bleeding edge, I wouldn't want to try using another transport protocol unless I could afford time and skill to do a lot of fixing up.

However, HTTP doesn't have to run on port 80. Furthermore, most SOAP implementations will be (well, claim to be) happy on HTTPS too, so that's an easy way to do encryption.

As for the 'web page vs functional' thing, well that's not so simple. A request for a page produced by a CGI script is a functional request coming from strangers over the web. SOAP need not be different.

At the moment, if I want to make an XML version of my content available to folks, I might tell them to use HTTP GET with a URL that invokes a CGI program that returns some XML.

In the future, I might want to make the same XML available via the getXML method my Website class, and then SOAP enable my Website class.

The differences isn't that great.

In theory ...

[King Of Chat]

It can be really quite secure because:

You can use any port you choose. A bit "security through obscurity" this one, but no harm there>

You don't really need a full web server. All you're going to get is an HTTP request with a SOAP envelope thingy inside. If it doesn't match the WSDL (or whatever) schema thingy you've published, then just ignore it. You only need give the information to people who are going to be legitimately calling your service. Of course you're still vulnerable to normal DoS, but then isn't everyone.

It is quite possible to digitally sign SOAP requests. Just ignore anything not signed/not signed by a recognized customer.

If you are only exepcting SOAP requests from a few other servers, then consider client-side SSL. Since only a few servers will be calling you, then you'll only need a few client certs.

Like everything, it's as secure as you make it. If you expose "FuckMyOS" as a SOAP method and publish it through UDDI or something then ... well ... you get what you ask for. Signatures on SOAP requests aren't (easily) supported by everything yet - but then SOAP implementations differ (eg MS SOAP has no types, IBM SOAP does). This isn't a major issue as it's pretty easy to roll your own request - it's only XML after all.

PS I have no opinion on Vladinator's website.

better to separate your ports

[TheSHAD0W]

IMO you should run separate functions on separate ports. I don't think this increases or decreases security much, but it greatly improves scalability.

I could, for instance, run my setup on a single box; and then, when traffic went up and the service got popular, replace the box with a Linux firewall to an intranet. The functions could then be divided among several machines on that intranet, and having the firewall box route different ports to their dedicated machines would be a trivial task.

Hell, you could even have redundant machines for critical operations, and if a failure occurred you need only change the routing on the firewall box to get things back up.

Isn't this just an idea for a portal?

[isa-kuruption]

Portals are nice, from a security perspective. You can run all your applications behind a front-end webserver, only accessible via port 80. Some nice firewalls, like Checkpoint, have an HTTP security server which does bounds checking and similar to HTTP requests. Couple this with a good, reliable webserver (apache or netscape), and any applications running behind the portal are less susceptable to an overflow attack since the only machine that can access these applications is the webserver, which means an attacker would have to compromise the web server first.

Also by doing portals in this way, you can force users to authenticate an HTTPS session before accessing the portal site, and the services behind the portal. Of course, how you do authentication can be anything from login/pass to securid or X.509 certificates. Once the users authenticate themselves, then accessing the applications "through port 80" is more secure.

However, setting up multiple DMZs is the way to go. In my example above, where the webserver accesses the services behind the portal, you'd set up those applications in their own DMZ (seperate from the webserver DMZ). Access to this DMZ wouldn't be allowed directly from the outside (restricted by FW), which again would require a compromise of the web server. The other advantage is, if an attacker were to compromise the application *somehow* without a webserver compromise, then this would restrict them to only boxes in this second DMZ and therefore would not compromise the webserver ALSO. Setting up a DMZ correctly means a lot. You can set up a DMZ to accept incoming connections but not to allow anything outbound (except for state traffic). This would prevent an attacker, who has compromised services in the DMZ, from attacking anything else from that point into the rest of your network.

Building analogy

[1984]

This isn't a perfect analogy, but think of it like a building, where port 80 is the front door that comes into the foyer. The windows are miscellaneous ports, and the loading dock is some port you use for something else (maybe 22).

Let's say you have a security system hooked up to the front door, the windows, loading dock doors etc. Normally pretty much anyone is allowed to walk through the front door. You do hope nobody manages to climb in through a window, and you have strictly controlled access via the loading dock.

Now if your reception is poorly designed your only hope is that nobody who walks through the front door hacks off the head of your receptionist and proceeds to go walkabout through the building screwing with things. If your reception is well designed this will be hard to do.

You could even have it so that there's some hazard to those right there in reception but breaking out of reception is as hard as breaking in any other way. But you don't just assume it's secure because it's nicely decorated or (in this case) because so many people walk through receptions it *must* be secure.

It's just a security model. If you alter the constraints and facilities of the environment, then you've also changed the range of threats to that environment. And you tailor the prophylactic security, intrusion detection and response to the potential threats and damage of compromise.

Overall, if you want to have any security, you have to think about security. However the hell you set up your systems.

Re:The *reason* for the tendancy

[ostiguy]

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

Implementing IP over SOAP

[melquiades]

It's a new trend, run everything on port 80 so your network admin has less to worry about, but that whole concept is a steaming pile of shit.

So true.

It's taken many years to build up the many layers of network security we have. One of the main reason SOAP is so easy to use is that it drills a hole right through all those layers. In other words, SOAP is easy because it encourages you to ignore everything that makes remote applications hard -- like security.

As an example of just how wacky the everything-on-port-80 idea is, and how dangerous, consider this idea I heard from Bruce Schneier: implement IP over SOAP: have a SOAP service listening at two endpoints for IP packets, and forward those packets over SOAP to the other endpoint. Then make one of those endpoints the default gateway for packets into the otherwise-secure network at the other end....

Just ponder that.

Re:Implementing IP over SOAP

[miguel]

SOAP does not drill any holes that POST would not have.

And you are most likely going to find SOAP engines that perform a lot of error checking and parsing of an XML message behore handing it to you than your average cgi-bin script that gets the POST request.

A positive note..

[Thomas Charron]

After posting my last reply, I thought of something that is a GOOD thing regarding SOAP over HTTP that deserves mentioning. By directing and detecting all web traffic, you now have a transactional log off all RPC calls being made into your system. So while yes, you are possibly exposing things, you have a much better logging mechanism in a central location then you would have by having any given application tunneling thru its own socket, making calls to its hearts content. All calls cal now be logged, filter, redirected, etc..

Now of course, this does apply only to SOAP over HTTP, and possibly not SMTP/POP3, Raw socket, MSMQ, etc..etc..

SOAP requests *can* be filtered

[dacron]

SOAP has actually gone well out of its way to allow server admins to filter requests. It makes use of the "Mandatory Header" aspects of the HTTP protocol such that every soap request must come with an HTTP header specifying which function is being called. Since it's in the header, a server doesn't need to know SOAP to filter, it justs needs to know HTTP, and the server can simply turn away anything that doesn't provide such a header.

I agree there is still a major lack of support for this type of filtering, and even the standard leaves something to be desired in this respect, but the SOAP designers definitely did think that this was a big enough problem to provide facilities for future closing of these holes.
It's a bit of a pain to administer, but it definitely *can* be done.

Re:The *reason* for the tendancy

[ackthpt]

There's always the honor system...

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
o __________Notice _________ o
o If you are a cracker or o
o terrorist please use port o
o port 80 as it is secure. o
o Otherwise you may use the o
o non-secure port 2000. o
o Thanks and have a nice day o
oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

OF COURSE its more secure!!! ;)

[einhverfr]

I don't know about you, but this thing seems much more like-- Firewall Enhancement Protocol. The writers of this rfc seem to think that this is the best thing for the internet since OSPF....

Seriously-- allowing ANY sort of RPC through a firewall has some serious risks.

Re:OF COURSE its more secure!!! ;)

[Cato]

You did notice this RFC was dated April 1st, didn't you? It's poking fun at people who think tunnelling through firewalls is a good idea...

Firewalls will have to become heuristic

[Ars-Fartsica]

At some point it will be simply impossible to effectively firewall by port, protocol or syntax. There are so many ways of piping functionality acrosss the network that firewalls are simply going to have to become intelligent about what represents a hostile bytestream.

I wonder if anyone is working on this?

I asked MS the same question at PDC 2000

[merlin_jim]

I asked pretty much the same thing of Microsoft when they first announced .NET (which is closely tied to SOAP) For anyone who's curious, I asked a couple people, so I don't really remember WHO I talked to, but I do know that Scott Gu was one of the people.

Their response?

Developers are tired of being hampered by netadmins, trying to open up unsecure ports just so that DCOM will work. Basically, SOAP is a way to do it where you don't have to open up esoteric and undocumented ports and protocols...

As far as security goes... it's up to the implementors. SOAP does have one advantage over some other forms of RPC, in that it has a few built in forms of authentication and is explicit as opposed to implicit. That means you can't just randomly activate bits of code just because you can log onto a server.

Another advantage of SOAP is that a decent XML coder can write his own parser for the protocol, so you don't have to use the vendor's, and you can customize your parser to only pass safe requests.

Of course, some of the MS people indicated that they felt I should use the MS parser at this point. I haven't seen anything bad with it, but I wouldn't have any qualms about writing my own if the business needs dictated it...

SOAP is designed to combat security

[ahde]

SOAP was developed specifically so companies (such as Microsoft) can execute arbitrary code through otherwise secure firewalls where all they have to do is get the user to download a simple client program that wraps the commands in an XML format and sends it as an innocent looking HTTP response. It was designed to *solve* the problem of corporate users wanting to run network applications that are verboten or otherwize blocked by their network administrators.

SOAP is designed with security in mind. Security circumvention.

Bruce Schneier on SOAP

[heilbron]

Bruce Schneier had an interesting statement on security and SOAP:

<a href="http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram-0006. html#SOAP">CryptoGram Newsletter on 2001-June-15:SOAP</a>

You should try running an ASP.

[AugstWest]

I work for an ASP, and we basically have to build full web applications that function like Office tools, and believe me, port 80 is a necessity.

We need to fire up a java applet on the client machine that maintains a session with the server. We also need to allow chat.

I can't begin to tell you how many million sof dollars we've lost as a company because of large corporations that refuse to adjust their firewall settings to accomodate web applications.

Some of them don't want .jar files being executed. Some of them just don't want to allow anything but port 80.

If we're only allowed traffic on port 80, which is the case when dealing with 90% of corporate environments, your choice is either a) get the services running over port 80 or b) give up on maintaining your business.

web services security as an emerging market

[mbogosian]

To date, there have been a large number of tools dedicated to the creation and deployment of web services, but relatively little thought has been given to relationship management between services (a subset of which is security). Only a handful of companies (e.g., the deftly-named Grand Central and Flamenco) have started to broach this issue.

I think we can expect to see a large amount of activity in the area of what it takes to connect web services in the real world (i.e., with sensitive data, in business-critical operations, etc.) in the near future. One certainly would not one's web services to be abused/cracked as easily as Microsoft's Passport "technology". It will be interesting to see how this new market evolves.

Why do we even need ports in the first place?

[rice_burners_suck]

I would say that drilling open a bunch of ports on a firewall is probably safer than opening port 80 and nothing else and running all services through this port. Why do you suppose we have ports in the first place? If everything is supposed to run on just one port, than we should have just an IP address and no ports at all! But we do have ports, 64K of them.

In my opinion, every "server" program running on a computer should have its own dedicated ports which it listens on and performs operations through. For secure operation, you decide which services you need and enable only those services. Since all ports not used by these services are, well, not used, then you should block those ports in your firewall.

Want more security? Most non-computer people simply don't understand the concept of good computer maintainence. I keep telling people that just like any machine, computers need to be well maintained or their operation degrades over time. (And that means that security vulnerabilities become more likely as time goes by without proper maintainence.) This includes software and hardware maintainence. Once you have a well functional system working, you can search for big security vulnerabilities, like unnecessary programs or whatever. Once those are gone, you look for smaller things, like software configuration that might allow an intruder to get increased priveledges. Once those are gone, you can go deeper, by getting some h4x0r programs and torture testing your system (being careful not to mess up other peoples' systems in the process). Once you can't get into your own system, you can go deeper yet by examining and auditing the source code of programs you're running (if the source is available to you). I'm sure there are about 30 other steps in between these, but these four are the big tick-marks I can think of right now. Oh well.

Re:The *reason* for the tendancy

[abe ferlman]

Just don't drop your SOAP on port 80 if you know what's good for you...

You can tunnel anything inside of anything.

[booch]

One problem with firewalls (especially packet filters) is that it's hard to know exactly what data is flowing through. You can really tunnel any protocol over any other - you just need to know how to encapsulate and decapsulate it. Distinguishing whether data is regular data or encapsulated data of another type is hard to do. So I suspect that security people are going to have a hard time, unless we can convince the developers that they *need* firewalls and to stop tunneling holes through.

The Real Reason ...

[StormyMonday]

... for the SOAP protocol is that Microsoft's ActiveX services use a portmapper to get dynamic port numbers for their services. Needless to say, this is absolute hell to try to run through a firewall with anything resembling security.

Hence SOAP. You piggyback your ActiveX control onto another service (HTTP) that uses a single port. Smart admins will use something other than port 80; we know how many of *those* there are.

There is also the problem that firewall admins tend to take their job seriously -- they know that if anything nasty gets into the network, they'll get blamed for it. They tend to be *very* conservitave. Web admins don't -- most of them think that the worst that can happen if they get hacked is that they'll get pitchers of nekkid wimmen on the corporate homepage. They don't care. *Much* easier to deal with web admins than firewall admins. Lotsa places will even let you have your own web server if you promise to be nice.

As to what it can lead to, check out RFC 3093, Firewall Enhancement Protocol (FEP)

Apache is the new inetd

[ipoverscsi]

A couple of rebuttals if I may.

Many people claim that one can run services on any port they choose, so port filtering is not the same thing as service filtering. True, but if people ran anything on any port we would have no concept of well-known-services at specific ports. Moving web traffic from port 80 makes almost no sense because that's where everyone is going to look for it by default. There is a high probability, then, that filtering on specific ports will filter specific services.

Network administrators, by default, are highly suspicious and paranoid people. They don't even trust the people they work with, and for good reason. If they could force everyone to use pine or mutt for e-mail reading, I'm sure they would since it is less succeptible to Outlook-born viruses. If development teams would communicate with and seek advice from the security team when developing applications I'm sure there wouldn't be as much hostility to opening a port as there is when approached with "We just wrote an application. Can we have a free port?"[1]. In the latter case, the security team has no idea what the application does or how it was developed and is certainly not inclined to open a port to untrusted software.

Finally, on to the subject of my article, Apache (or whatever server you're running) is the inetd of the future. Look at the facts:

• both listen on one or more ports for requests
• when a request comes in it is dispatched to the correct subsystem
• most security (ssl, https, tcpwrappers) is handled by the daemon before it gets to the service handler
• the service handler can perform further accouting or security checks
• the daemon handles all the networking details on behalf of the subsystem

Add to this the fact that this is all multiplexed on a single port, and configuring your firewall should be a breeze. Virtually anything you can do with inetd you can do with a good web server.

Paradoxically, network admins appear less paranoid about their web servers than other inetd-based or standalone services. Some guy codes up a web app and, with little fuss, gets it deployed on the server. No code review, no hassle, no problem! There are only two reasons I can think of for this behavior: 1) The administrator inherently trusts the web server, or 2) the web server box is in a DMZ. I would be suspicious of administrators in the former case.

Despite the security advantages of a DMZ, it is still necessary for application developers to communicate with security people. Say, for example, that a web application is deployed on server in a DMZ and that the machine is later compromized. If the application had a configuration file with passwords for a database, the database should now be considered compromized. Damage can be reduced or prevented by correct configuration of the database (providing write access only to a specific table rather than the whole database), but you should check with the security people before actual deployment.[2]

[1] The standard answer to this question is "No". Note that the administrator only answers the question asked. If you want to be more successful in the future, present a full document detailing what the software does, how it works, and maybe provide the admin with a code review, THEN ask for a port. I know this is a lot of work, but it is necessary to maintain the security of the network. You may not take security seriously, but your administrator does.

[2] Yes, I know that there are moron security people out there. My comment assumes you have good to excellent security people working in your company.

Re:The *reason* for the tendancy

[ostiguy]

Yes, I, a single netadmin, am well on my way to destroying TCP/IP.

SOAP is being pushed as an alternative to EDI, Corba, etc, etc (this isn't my area, remember, I am the netadmin trying to destroy tcp/ip). This is because firewall/security teams are not interested in working with (their company's) vendors to establish IPSec tunnels, or SSL tunnels for various apps. Instead of quicker binary transfer within a ssl or ipsec tunnel, stuff will be kludged into https, lest the firewall team's sensibilities be offended.

There will be a huge market for near (as near as one can get) wirespeed http proxies soon as a result. Pretty soon some one will build some hack with some beta of .net that is vulnerable, and all hell will break loose as http becomes the big threat (as seen on the front of Infoweek/world/land, etc). A big market will result as companies throw proxies in front of their webservers , and in front of their end users internally to protect against this self generated menace.

ostiguy

Security policy MUST enable business, not inhibit

[ajv]

It's not about the connection method, it's the content that traverses the corporate boundary that is the issue.

If the content shouldn't be going over the boundary, then it doesn't matter how you achieved it - you're still in the wrong. You could do it in CORBA, you could do it in simple HTTP GET and POSTs, it doesn't matter.

As a developer, I can make SOAP invisible to all firewall administrators using HTTPS or abusing their firewall's limitations (most firewalls are incredibly stupid - they don't and can't parse even basic protocols like HTTP, thus let anything that goes out on port X out if port X is allowed outbound.

As a person responsible for security, your use of any services not explicitly allowed is probably against security policy. But security policy is there to enable business, not inhibit it. This is the single biggest failing of most security people: they lose sight of why they are there!.

If it takes too long to get a content-flow approved, then that is a failing of the content-flow negotiation process, and it's not about technology at all.