I'm using Apache FOP and have no idea if it can be configured to handle
user/passwords.  It doesn't 'out of the box'.  Maybe it can ... 

Even if it could I'd have to send the user/pass using some other
possibly insecure mechanism.

For example, how does the ML  *application*  know the password ? I don't
believe I have access to it from within the app,

unless I'm doing application level authentication then I'd have to store
it in a session variable or cookile  (??).  Currently I'm doing digest
authentication

so the app doesnt have access (that I know of) to the password used to
login. 

I can simply hard code it in either the ML app or the tomcat app.  But
if I hard code it why bother with authentication in the first place.

And then IT changes the password and the app breaks.

 

There are certainly a lot of *possible* ways to solve this problem but
many of them have huge security holes, or are very complicated.

 

This is what I mean about the problem of sending around authentication
information.   Its not too hard to do *badly* but it's hard to do well.

 

I'd love to have access to a simple secure pre-authenticated
time-expiration-bound  token I could send across process or machines
over an open channel.

 

 

-David

 

 

 

From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Justin
Makeig
Sent: Sunday, April 18, 2010 5:57 PM
To: General Mark Logic Developer Discussion
Subject: Re: [MarkLogic Dev General] RE:
PassingauthenticationinformationinaURL

 

David,

Which FOP processor are you using on the Java side? Does it have
specific configuration that would allow you to specify a user/password
for HTTP authentication?

 

Justin

 

 

Justin Makeig
Product Manager
Mark Logic Corporation
999 Skyway Road
Suite 200
San Carlos, CA 94070
+1 650 655 2387 Phone
[email protected]
www.marklogic.com <http://www.marklogic.com/>
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On Apr 18, 2010, at 8:06 AM, Lee, David wrote:









Why do you want to re-login? To utilize permissions on the images?


Yes. The theory being I could then count on ML to do authentication for
me instead of making it up myself.
This is all somewhat pedantic because in this case I don't really need
high security for the images,
just was hoping for a general solution that could be reused 'next time'
when I really want security.

I propose to MarkLogic that implementing a security token mechanism in
the system would be a good thing.
Of course I realize it's a LOT harder to do right then to hack it.  Once
you open the whole can of worms about
passing around pre-authenticated tokens its truely a tough security
problem to solve perfectly so I can see why they 
haven't implemented it (yet).   But on the other hand, since it is so
hard to do right, it really is something
that should be done by the system, not re-invented by every user, who
wont do as good a job.

-David



----------------------------------------
David A. Lee
Senior Principal Software Engineer
Epocrates, Inc.
[email protected]
812-482-5224



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