Andrew S. Townley, lead architect for the Irish government’s Public Services Broker (PSB), explains the concepts behind XML gateways and takes a look at how they might be applied to secure a large-scale SOA environment. XML gateways, such as those introduced by IBM lately, promise to offload many message processing issues to hardware appliances.
Andrew lists the content-related security issues involved in securing a service-oriented environment:
- HTTP header inspection
- XML denial of service detection
- XML external entity attack prevention
- SQL injection prevention
- Buffer overflow prevention
- Service scanning prevention
- Message size analysis
- SOAP attachment analysis
- XML well-formedness validation
- XML schema validation
- XPath processing
- Auto-generation of XML Schema (XSD) from WSDL
- Auto-generation of XML Schema (XSD) from sample XML messages
He then explains some of these issues in more detail and shows how they are (or aren't) handled by XML gateways.
The conclusion of his posting is:
A lot of people [...] think things like XML gateways are “pixie dust” for security in the same way that people thought XML was some sort of magic solution to all business data representation and exchange problems. The answer to the question posed in the title of this article [...] is: it depends. Hopefully, if you’ve made it this far, you learned a few things, and you’ll be better prepared to participate in the overall security effort and answer the XML gateway question for yourself–regardless of your role within your organization.