I thought i'd throw this out there as I've been mulling it over for a while.
Sling is a pretty powerful framework, and one of its most powerful pieces is the SlingPostServlet, which provides a client-based interface for manipulating data. Now, the SlingPostServlet seems very powerful and very useful in a trusted environment - for example, on the authoring side of sling-based CMS ;) -- where there is some amount of trust that the folks w access won't fire up a REST client and start shooting off operations (assuming they enjoy gainful employment). When you expose the SlingPostServlet to the public (internet) things seem like they can get dicey. For example, if I find a set of nodes that that are writeable to me (say under my profile, or some suer generated content tree) I could start adding unexpected data, like unexpected properties that could show up in public representations of the resource (XML, JSON, etc.) or moving/renaming nodes, etc. There are a couple ways to help mitigate this: 1) Ensure all the correct permissions are applied to the resources in question (however this only helps prevent certain operations - if a resource is writable, permissioning won't restrict what properties I can write to it) 2) Create SlingPostProcessors that handle all the various conditions - PostProcessors are executed after the POST operation has taken place, and I'm not aware of a way to tell Sling to revert all changes and fail the operation. 3) Create workflows/eventhandlers that perform some sort of async data verification/scrubbing - I don't like this sort of async as bad things can still happen to the data, and its difficult to alert the client of an issue. Which leaves creating POST servlet/jsp handlers for each resource-type to handle data manipulation, which will be used in lieu of the SlingPostServlet. TLDR My problem in using the SlingPostServlet requires you to develop (conceptually) a blacklist of behaviors/operations/data that should not be allowed - rather than a whitelist -- and I hope most of us will concede that a whitelist is (almost) always better than a blacklist when it comes to managing security. Am i missing something here? Does anyone have examples of actual Prod sites where the SlingPostServlet is heavily leveraged to allow public clients manipulate data? I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts and how they've handle similar situations. -- David Gonzalez Sent with Sparrow (http://www.sparrowmailapp.com/?sig)
