RESTful web service - how to authenticate requests from other services

Question

I am designing a RESTful web service that needs to be accessed by users  but also other web services and applications  All of the incoming requests need to be authenticated  All communication takes place over HTTPS  User authentication is going to work based on an authentication token  acquired by POSTing the username and password  over an SSL connection  to a  session resource provided by the service   In the case of web service clients  there is no end user behind the client service  The requests are initiated by scheduled tasks  events or some other computer operations  The list of connecting services is known beforehand  obviously  I guess   How should I authenticate these requests coming from other  web  services  I want the authentication process to be as easy as possible to implement for those services  but not at the cost of security  What would be the standard and best practices for a scenario like this   Options that I can think of  or have been suggested to me     Have the client services resort to having a  fake  username and password  and authenticate them in the same way as users  I do not like this option - it just doesn t feel right  Assign a permanent application id for the client service  possibly an application key as well  As far as I have understood this is just the same as having username   password  With this id and key  I can either authenticate each request  or create an authentication token to authenticate further requests  Either way  I do not like this option  because anyone who can get a hold of the application id and key can impersonate the client  I could add an IP address check to previous option  This would make it harder to perform fake requests  Client certificates  Set up my own certificate authority  create root certificate  and create client certificates for the client services  A couple of issues come to mind  though  a  how do I still allow the users to authenticate without certificates and b  how complicated is this scenario to implement from the client service point of view  Something else - there must be other solutions out there     My service would be running on Java  but I deliberately left out information about what specific framework it would be built on  because I am more interested on the basic principles and not so much on the implementation details - I assume the best solution for this will be possible to implement regardless of the underlying framework  However  I am a bit inexperienced with this subject  so concrete tips and examples on the actual implementation  such as useful third party libraries  articles  etc   will be much appreciated as well

User · Answer

Besides authentication  I suggest you think about the big picture  Consider make your backend RESTful service without any authentication  then put some very simple authentication required middle layer service between the end user and the backend service

User · Answer

As far as the client certificate approach goes  it would not be terribly difficult to implement while still allowing the users without client certificates in   If you did in fact create your own self-signed Certification Authority  and issued client certs to each client service  you would have an easy way of authenticating those services   Depending on the web server you are using  there should be a method to specify client authentication that will accept a client cert  but does not require one  For example  in Tomcat when specifying your https connector  you can set  clientAuth want   instead of  true  or  false   You would then make sure to add your self signed CA certificate to your truststore  by default the cacerts file in the JRE you are using  unless you specified another file in your webserver configuration   so the only trusted certificates would be those issued off of your self signed CA   On the server side  you would only allow access to the services you wish to protect if you are able to retrieve a client certificate from the request  not null   and passes any DN checks if you prefer any extra security  For the users without client certs  they would still be able to access your services  but will simply have no certificates present in the request   In my opinion this is the most  secure  way  but it certainly has its learning curve and overhead  so may not necessarily be the best solution for your needs

User · Answer

You can create Session on server and share sessionId in between client and server with each REST call    First authenticate REST request   authenticate  Returns response  as per your client format  with sessionId  ABCDXXXXXXXXXXXXXX  Store this sessionId in Map with actual session  Map put sessionid  session  or use SessionListener to create and destroy keys for you   public void sessionCreated HttpSessionEvent arg0         add session to a static Map     public void sessionDestroyed HttpSessionEvent arg0         Remove session from static map    Get sessionid with every REST call  like URL jsessionid ABCDXXXXXXXXXXXXXX  or other way   Retrive HttpSession from map using sessionId  Validate request for that session if session is active  Send back response or error message

User · Answer

There are several different approaches you can take    The RESTful purists will want you to use BASIC authentication  and send credentials on every request  Their rationale is that no one is storing any state  The client service could store a cookie  which maintains a session ID  I don t personally find this as offensive as some of the purists I hear from - it can be expensive to authenticate over and over again  It sounds like you re not too fond of this idea  though  From your description  it really sounds like you might be interested in OAuth2 My experience so far  from what I ve seen  is that it s kind of confusing  and kind of bleeding edge  There are implementations out there  but they re few and far between  In Java  I understand that it has been integrated into Spring3 s security modules   Their tutorial is nicely written   I ve been waiting to see if there will be an extension in Restlet  but so far  although it s been proposed  and may be in the incubator  it s still not been fully incorporated

User · Answer

5  Something else - there must be other solutions out there   You re right  there is   And it is called JWT  JSON Web Tokens    JSON Web Token  JWT  is an open standard  RFC 7519  that defines a compact and self-contained way for securely transmitting information between parties as a JSON object  This information can be verified and trusted because it is digitally signed  JWTs can be signed using a secret  with the HMAC algorithm  or a public private key pair using RSA   I highly recommend looking into JWTs   They re a much simpler solution to the problem when compared against alternative solutions   https   jwt io introduction

User · Answer

I believe the approach    First request  client sends id passcode Exchange id pass for unique token Validate token on each subsequent request until it expires   is pretty standard  regardless of how you implement and other specific technical details   If you really want to push the envelope  perhaps you could regard the client s https key in a temporarily invalid state until the credentials are validated  limit information if they never are  and grant access when they are validated  based again on expiration   Hope this helps

User · Answer

I would use have an application redirect a user to your site with an application id parameter  once the user approves the request generate a unique token that is used by the other app for authentication  This way the other applications are not handling user credentials and other applications can be added  removed and managed by users  Foursquare and a few other sites authenticate this way and its very easy to implement as the other application

User · Answer

After reading your question  I would say  generate special token to do request required  This token will live in specific time  lets say in one day    Here is an example from to generate authentication token    day   10     month   100     year  last 2 digits    1000    for example   3 June 2011   3   10     6   100     11   1000     30   600   11000   11630   then concatenate with user password  example  my4wesomeP4ssword    11630my4wesomeP4ssword    Then do MD5 of that string   05a9d022d621b64096160683f3afe804   When do you call a request  always use this token   https   mywebservice com  token 05a9d022d621b64096160683f3afe804 amp op getdata   This token is always unique everyday  so I guess this kind of protection is more than sufficient to always protect ur service   Hope helps

User · Answer

Any solution to this problem boils down to a shared secret  I also don t like the hard-coded user-name and password option but it does have the benefit of being quite simple  The client certificate is also good but is it really much different  There s a cert on the server and one on the client  It s main advantage is that it s harder to brute force  Hopefully you ve got other protections in place to protect against that though   I don t think your point A for the client certificate solution is difficult to resolve  You just use a branch  if  client side certificat    check it   else   http basic auth   I m no java expert and I ve never worked with it to do client side certificates  However a quick Google leads us to this tutorial which looks right up your alley   Despite all of this  what s best  discussion  let me just point out that there is another philosophy that says   less code  less cleverness is better    I personally hold this philosophy   The client certificate solution sounds like a lot of code   I know you expressed questions about OAuth  but the OAuth2 proposal does include a solution to your problem called  bearer tokens  which must be used in conjunction with SSL  I think  for the sake of simplicity  I d choose either the hard-coded user pass  one per app so that they can be revoked individually  or the very similar bearer tokens

[web-services] RESTful web service - how to authenticate requests from other services?

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