Scalable Reliable Secure REST
- 1. Scalable, Reliable, and Secure RESTful HTTP A practical guide to building to HTTP based services
- 2. Today’s talk Goal: learn how to build services with HTTP in a reliable, secure, and scalable fashion.
- 3. What this talk is NOT
- 4. What is REST? Representation State Transfer Roy Fielding coined the term for his thesis which sought to provide the architectural basis for HTTP
- 6. Resources, resources, resources Everything is a resource Resources are addressable via URI s Resources are self descriptive Typically through content types (“application/xml”) and sometimes the resource body (i.e. an XML QName) Resources are stateless Resources are manipulated via verbs and the uniform interface
- 8. Hypertext and linkability We don’t want “keys”, we want links! Resources are hypertext Hypertext is just data with links to other resources Data model refers to other application states via links This is possible because of the uniform interface! No need to know different ways to get different types of entities! Client can simply navigate to different resources
- 9. REST & HTTP REST defines the architectural style of HTTP We’ll discuss RESTful principles in relation to HTTP specifically as we explore Scalability Reliability Security
- 13. Some Basic Scenarios: Getting resources Deleting resources Updating a resource Creating a resource
- 14. Getting a resource GET is SAFE If original GET fails, just try, try again
- 15. Updating a resource Server Client
- 16. Deleting a resource Server Client
- 17. Creating Resources HTTP/1.1 201 Created Date: … Content-Length: 0 Location: http://acme.com/entries/1 … Server Client Client Server HTTP/1.1 200 OK … POST /entries Host: acme.com … PUT /entries/1 Host: acme.com Content-Type: … Content-Length: … Some data…
- 18. Creating Resources IDs which are not used can be Ignored Expired Another option: have the client generate a unique ID and PUT to it straight away They’re liable to screw it up though
- 19. Problem: Firewalls Many firewalls do not allow PUT, DELETE You might want to allow other ways of specifying a header: Google: X-HTTP-Method-Override: PUT Ruby: ?method=PUT
- 20. Scalability ETags, Caching, Content-Types, URLs, and more
- 21. Scaling HTTP Statelessness and scalability ETags/LastModified Caching and proxies HEAD “ Expect: 100-continue” Batch operations Transactions & Compensation
- 22. Stateless client/server approach All communication is stateless Session state is kept on the Client! Client is responsible for transitioning to new states States are represented by URIs Improves: Visibility Reliability Scalability
- 23. ETag Header Resources may return an ETag header when it is accessed On subsequent retrieval of the resource, Client sends this ETag header back If the resource has not changed (i.e. the ETag is the same), an empty response with a 304 code is returned Reduces bandwidth/latency
- 24. ETag Example HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: … ETag: "3e86-410-3596fbbc" Content-Length: 1040 Content-Type: text/html … Server Client Client Server HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified Date: … ETag: "3e86-410-3596fbbc" Content-Length: 0… GET /feed.atom Host: www.acme.com … GET /feed.atom If-None-Match: "3e86-410-3596fbbc" Host: www.acme.com …
- 25. LastModified Example HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: … Last-Modified: Sat, 29 Oct 1994 19:43:31 GMT Content-Length: 1040 Content-Type: text/html … Client Server HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified Date: … Last-Modified: Sat, 29 Oct 1994 19:43:31 GMT Content-Length: 0 GET /feed.atom Host: www.acme.com … GET /feed.atom If-Modified-Since: Sat, 29 Oct 1994 19:43:31 GMT Host: www.acme.com …
- 26. Scalability through Caching A.k.a. “cache the hell out of it” Reduce latency, network traffic, and server load Types of cache: Browser Proxy Gateway
- 27. How Caching Works A resource is eligible for caching if: The HTTP response headers don’t say not to cache it The response is not authenticated or secure No ETag or LastModified header is present The cache representation is fresh From: http://www.mnot.net/cache_docs/
- 28. Is your cache fresh? Yes, if: The expiry time has not been exceeded The representation was LastModified a relatively long time ago If its stale, the remote server will be asked to validate if the representation is still fresh
- 29. Scalability through URLs and Content-Types Information about where the request is destined is held outside the message: Content-Type application/purchase-order+xml mage/jpeg URL Other headers Allows easy routing to the appropriate server with little overhead
- 30. HEAD Allows you to get meta data about a resource without getting the resource itself Identical to GET, except no body is sent Uses: Testing that a resource is available Testing link validity Learning when a resource was last modified
- 31. 100 Continue Allows client to determine if server is willing to accept a request based on request headers It may be highly inefficient to send the full request if the server will reject it
- 32. 100 Continue
- 33. Transactions The web is NOT designed for transactions Client is responsible for committing/rolling back transactions, and client may not fulfill responsibilities Transactions can take too long over the web and tie up important resources In general, it is much better to build in application specific compensation for distributed services See the paper: Life Beyond Transactions by Pat Helland
- 34. So you really want transactions… People sometimes use HTTP for transactions Notable example: SVN It is possible to model a resource as a transaction POST – create a new transaction PUT – send “commit” state to transaction DELETE – rollback the transaction
- 35. Batch Operations How do we manipulate multiple resource states at the same time? Options: Use HTTP connection pipelining Broken by some firewalls POST GData does this, but has received a very cold reception from the community
- 36. Security
- 37. Question #1 What are your goals & requirements? Authentication? Authorization? Privacy? Integrity? Single sign on?
- 38. Tools at our disposal HTTP Authentication SSL XML Signature & Encryption OpenID Others: SAML, Cardspace…
- 39. HTTP Authentication Basics Basic Authentication Username & Password passed in plain text Digest MD5 has of username & password is created Sent with every request Remember – statelessness?
- 40. SSL and Public Key Cryptography SSL/TLS defines a process to encrypt/secure transports
- 41. How SSL works Client Server Sends random number encrypted with server’s public key.
- 42. How SSL works Client Server Server sends random number to client. Can be unencrypted since Client may not have public key.
- 43. How SSL works Client Server Server and Client compute a shared secret using the negotiated hash algorithm. 94AB134… 94AB134…
- 44. How SSL works Client Server Communication is encrypted using the new shared secret & symmetric cryptography
- 45. Client Authentication Server can authenticate the Client using it’s public key as well Requires key distribution Server side must import every client public key into it’s keystore
- 46. Limitations of SSL Does not work well with intermediaries If you have a gateway handling SSL, how do you actually get the certificate information? Limited ability for other authentication tokens beyond those of HTTP Auth i.e. SAML Some implementations support NTLM (Commons HTTPClient)
- 47. OpenID “ provides a way to prove that an End User owns an Identity URL” An attempt at single sign on. Your identity is your URL Provides no information about who the actual person/entity is
- 48. XML Signature & Encryption Provide message level security when needed Limited support across languages Mostly Java & .NET Allows other types of authentication mechanisms beyond just SSL
- 49. An XML digital signature < ds:Signature > < ds:SignedInfo > < ds:CanonicalizationMethod Algorithm = "http://www.w3.org/2001/10/xml-exc-c14n#" /> < ds:SignatureMethod Algorithm = "http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#rsa-sha1" /> < ds:Reference URI = "#mySignedElement" > < ds:Transforms > < ds:Transform Algorithm = "http://www.w3.org/2001/10/xml-exc-c14n#" /> </ ds:Transforms > < ds:DigestMethod Algorithm = "http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#sha1" /> < ds:DigestValue > EULddytSo1... </ ds:DigestValue > </ ds:Reference > </ ds:SignedInfo > < ds:SignatureValue > BL8jdfToEb1l/vXcMZNNjPOV... </ ds:SignatureValue > < ds:KeyInfo > … </ ds:KeyInfo > </ ds:Signature >
- 50. HTTP Security Limitations For non XML data, there is no standard way to do Message signing Non repudiation Multifactor authentication Token exchange
- 51. Other Thoughts
- 52. Consider using Atom Publishing Protocol Atom: a format for syndication Describes “lists of related information” – a.k.a. feeds Feeds are composed of entries User Extensible More generic than just blog stuff
- 53. Atom Publishing Protocol RESTful protocol for building services Create, edit, delete entries in a collection Extensible Protocol Paging extensions GData Opensearch Properly uses HTTP so can be scalable, reliable and secure
- 54. Why you should use APP for your app Provides ubiquitous elements which have meaning across all contexts You can leverage existing solutions for security HTTP Auth, WSSE, Google Login, XML Sig & Enc Eliminates the need for you to write a lot of server/client code ETags, URLs, etc are all handled for you Integrates seamlessly with non-XML data There are many APP implementations and they are known to work well together
- 55. What other tools are available for building RESTful applications? HTTPD of course Java Servlets Restlets Spring MVC CXF Jersey (JSR 311 reference imlementation) Ruby on Rails Python’s Django Javascript’s XMLHttpRequest Abdera
- 56. Limitations HTTP is NOT an RPC or message passing system Not ideal for sending event based messages May have performance constraints for asynchronous messaging that JMS/others may not have Security Standards Most people will just use SSL, but… Exchanging other types of authentication tokens is not possible unless they are custom HTTP headers No standard way to establish trust relationships beside certificate hierarchies/webs
- 57. Conclusions HTTP Provides many tools/properties for us to build scalable, reliable, secure systems: Idempotent and safe methods ETags/LastModified Hypertext Caching URLs & Content Types SSL Beyond HTTP Atom Publishing Protocol XML Signatures & Encryption OpenID Much more…
- 58. Questions? Blog: http://netzooid.com/blog Email: dan.diephouse@mulesource.com Resources: RFC2616: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2616.html RESTful Web Services (Richardson, Ruby, DHH)
Editor's Notes
- #2: - Intro to self - Ask questions! 10 mins for questions at the end (may be a bit much, I know you norwegians are a talkative bunch)