From: Darryl Luff (dluffIITSCDM.COM.AU)
Date: Tue Oct 12 2004 - 00:56:35 CDT

• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]

On Sun, 2004-10-10 at 22:38 -0400, Abe Usher wrote:
> Security pundits have been warning about the dangers implicit with Web
> services for years. A good starting point for understanding the security
> issues related to Web services can be found at:
> http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid26_gci872720,00.html
>
The 'Monkey Shell' looks like a good demonstration, but it could have
just as easily been implemented using the normal CGI interface, or
straight HTTP requests. As things like httptunnel have done.

I don't understand why the 'New' web services, with requests and
responses encoded as XML over HTTP, are considered more insecure than
the 'old' web services with requests and responses encoded directly in
HTML, or in custom formats. The functionality is the same, only the
transport encoding is different.

I can see other problems with the 'new' services, with increased network
load, harder parsing for small devices, and the inevitable security
problems introduced with any newly written software. But I don't see how
changing the actual request/response encoding magically makes it any
less secure?

Mr Wagner in the linked article says that "the danger is that almost
anything can come over a web service connection". But "almost anything"
can also come over a straight HTTP connection. What's the difference?

--
NTBugtraq Editor's Note:

Want to reply to the person who sent this message? This list is configured such that just hitting reply is going to result in the message coming to the list, not to the individual who sent the message. This was done to help reduce the number of Out of Office messages posters received. So if you want to send a reply just to the poster, you'll have to copy their email address out of the message and place it in your TO: field.
--

• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]