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Subject: RE: [wsrp-wsia] [I#175] Roles should be per-Entity and not per-Producer


Carsten,


What you describe is more of an extra, orthogonal authentication and access
control security mechanism. One that:

1) allows the consumer to sign in to a producer (establishing a trust
relationship).

2) allows the producer to police the consumer (so as to conform to a role
based security policy).

3) [possibly] allows the consumer to run under impersonation (e.g. consumer
as user==retailer1).

This seems a valid vendor extension and I'm sure there will be others like
it. For 1.0, I would rather standardize a "username/password" registration
property than add WS-Security credentials, but that is another matter.


Your proposal, as I understand it, does not, however:

a) communicate the set of roles that are allowed for any one consumer into
which the consumer can place its local users.

b) communicate the (current) set of roles held by the user a markup request
is invoked for.

We have roleDescriptions in serviceDescription and producerRoles in
EntityDescription for (a) and producerRoles in UserContext for (b).


The standard mechanism (WS-Security) can wrap up the application specific
one (WSRP) [onion layers of security with remote Portlet at core], as I
believe both consumer authentication and access control and portal user role
management are real requirements.

I think the fundamental issue comes from trying to leverage the JSR 168 /
J2EE API for both, when, in fact, it is more like having both OS and
Application Server (or Java) security layers. My preference would be to use
the (non standard) consumer authentication & access control mechanism
(WS-Security as you propose) as the one reported by the Servlet-like Java
APIs [Note, an unauthenticated consumer would have no rights propagated to
the back ends] and to use a *new* role API for WSRP Portlets so that they
can manage fine grained (i.e. users in consumers) remote (i.e. subsets
specified by consumer) Portal roles. Then J2EE security works as for Web
applications and remote Portlets can add additional security logic and role
based customisation for remote users.

regards,
Andre

PS. Similar application end-to-end arguments apply for standardized use of
edit mode but I won't go there again.

-----Original Message-----
From: Carsten Leue [mailto:CLEUE@de.ibm.com]
Sent: 10 December 2002 17:43
To: Andre Kramer
Cc: wsrp-wsia@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [wsrp-wsia] [I#175] Roles should be per-Entity and not
per-Pr oducer


Hi Andre.

I think that the general approach to pass the roles in the context of a
trust relationship is already questionable. Normally - from my knowledge -
it rather works the way that a server (our producer) verifies the user
credentials on his own and assigns roles accordingly. The solution for WSRP
would be as follows.

1. we do not pass roles at all
2. we use WS-Security to pass user credentials (optionally). WS-Security
support is built-in in standard java stacks and the .NET stack. The
credentials and the respective server side role assignments will be handled
automatically by the stack.

The question now is what user credentials to pass. I see two options:
- during registration the producer tells the consumer a pair of
credentials. In this case the consumer portal would be seen as a user that
logs in to the producer portal with each WS request. The producer could
then assign roles to this consumer-user in the "normal" app server specific
way. The end-user would still be keyed via the user identifier we pass as
part of the user profile (however the user would not be logged in)
- if producer and  consumer share the same user population the real
end-user credentials could be exchanged. The information if the population
would be shared would be part of the registration process also.

Does that make sense? My strong feeling is that if we use roles we
establish a parallel authentication concept to WS-security that will become
obsolete and hurt us a lot in the future.

Best regards
Carsten Leue

-------
Dr. Carsten Leue
Dept.8288, IBM Laboratory Böblingen , Germany
Tel.: +49-7031-16-4603, Fax: +49-7031-16-4401



                                                                           
             Andre Kramer                                                  
             <andre.kramer@eu.                                             
             citrix.com>                                                To 
                                       Carsten Leue/Germany/IBM@IBMDE,     
             12/10/2002 05:34          wsrp-wsia@lists.oasis-open.org      
             PM                                                         cc 
                                                                           
                                                                   Subject 
                                       RE: [wsrp-wsia] [I#175] Roles       
                                       should be per-Entity and not per-Pr 
                                       oducer                              
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           




I must confess I am not able to keep up with the latest and greatest
security specs developments, but is WS-Security not more a framework for
developing security protocols rather than a protocol we could use as is?

Could you describe how WS-Security (SAML seems a better framework for this)
could be used to agree on the set of role definitions to be shared by the
producer and consumer and how it would be used to pass roles information
along with the rest of the UserContext we now have?

I could then check if I'm able to do this using the .NET tool chain, for
example.

regards,
Andre

-----Original Message-----
From: Carsten Leue [mailto:CLEUE@de.ibm.com]
Sent: 10 December 2002 16:03
To: wsrp-wsia@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [wsrp-wsia] [I#175] Roles should be per-Entity and not
per-Producer


Just to reopen the role discussion: instead of thinking of refining the
role support we should think of dropping it altogether. I summarized the
reasons for this already in another email.
One example reoccurs in Eilon's example - the producer that spans multiple
web-apps in J2EE. For me this seems to apply that the producer would use
the app's J2EE roles as WSRP roles. In this case I would also assume that
after a WSRP call containing such role information a call like isUserInRole
would work on the producer. However as no credentials are sent around this
is impossible to implement.

From my point of view it would be best to rely on WS-Security.

Best regards
Carsten Leue

-------
Dr. Carsten Leue
Dept.8288, IBM Laboratory Böblingen , Germany
Tel.: +49-7031-16-4603, Fax: +49-7031-16-4401




             Gil Tayar
             <Gil.Tayar@webcol
             lage.com>                                                  To
                                       wsrp-wsia@lists.oasis-open.org
             12/10/2002 09:18                                           cc
             AM
                                                                   Subject
                                       [wsrp-wsia] [I#175] Roles should be
                                       per-Entity and not per-Producer










Issue: 175
Status: Active
Topic: interface
Class: Technical
Raised by: Eilon Reshef
Title: Roles should be per-Entity and not per-Producer
Date Added: 10-Dec-2002
Document Section:   v0.85/4.1.7
Description:
RoleDescription[] - should it be per each Entity and not per Producer? The
current model only supports roles per Producer which works when the
Producer is a centralized portal environment, but makes it much harder to
manage and deploy changes in less controlled environment. For example, this
means that if a development environment allows portlet developers to define
custom roles per portlet (e.g., if one Producer may span multiple web-apps
in J2EE), then the Producer must continuously accumulate all roles from all
its portlets to present a coherent role list. And, the Consumer needs to
sample that list more often to ensure that there are no changes. Another
example is how would an application-level-WSRP-proxy support multiple
services with different roles?



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