WSRP Security Requirements

Version 0.2

5/28/02

Trust relationship between portal and portlet:

1. It should be possible to use a secure transport for portal/portlet communication.

2. There should be means for portlet to authenticate the portal when a service request is made:

a. authentication could be protocol-based(i.e. http/basic, ssl/certificate)

b. authentication could be document-based(i.e. digitally signed)

3. There should be a means of describing in the portlet’s metadata whether a secure transport is required and what the authentication method is.

4. There should be a key exchange mechanism for signed documents

Future consideration.

5. Should be a lighter weight mechanism, such as initial unauthenticated connection, then some way to ensure subsequent requestsobtain token for use in subsequent requests.

End user identity and personal data-related:

6. A portlet should be able to require that the portal authenticate the end user.

7. It should be possible for the portlet to describe the level of end-user authentication required.

8. It should be possible for the portal to communicate how it authenticated the end user to the portlet. same as 5The portlet should have a means of describing in it’s metadata how it wants to credentials to be secured

9. It should be possible for the portal to pass end user personal profile data to the portlet in a secure manner.

10. It should be possible to secure instance parameter data passed between portal and portlet.

11. It should be possible for the portlet to describe in its metadata which parameters are to be passed in a secure manner..(maybe replace all to SSL)

1. It should be possible for the portlet to describe what security is required out to the end-user client

12. The portlet should have a means of describing in it’s metadata how it wants personal data to be secured.

Secure Transmission of data:

13. It should be possible to use a secure transport for portal/portlet communication.
14. should be possible to use document encryption to secure data exchange between portal and portlet.
15. It should be possible for the portlet to require secure transport be used between portal and end-user client.

Access Control:

16. It should be possible for a portlet to define roles that describe levels of service access associated with the role.
17. When the portlet exposes roles in it’s metadata, the portal should provide a mechanism to map portal users to portlet roles.
18. There should be a mechanism for the portal to assert one or more roles with a service request.

Question: will the protocol support operational modes such as ‘edit’? If so, there will need to be information in the metadata about what modes a given portlet supports. This metadata would be used for the portal to control which users can access which operational modes(either directly or by an assertion in the service request that the portlet can use to conditionally render access to the mode in the markup it generates).