IBM WebSphere V5.0 Security - CGISecurity

If the user in role 'A' accesses /helloworld/helloEurope.html he will get an
authorization error saying that the user is not in the role of 'B', but we defined that
role ‘A’ should be able to access everything under /helloworld. The user in role ‘A’
can still access the /helloworld/helloAfrica.html resource, and the user in role ‘B’
can access /helloworld/helloEurope.html
As you see, Constraint ‘Y’ overrules Constraint ‘X’ in this situation.
The other approach would be to map roles to resources, and define the
authorized roles for each resource. Obviously, this is not a possible solution
since an application probably has more resources than we want to set up one by
one.
A solution, the same that we applied to the ITSOBank sample application, could
be to reuse the use cases for the application and follow them to define security
constraints. In this approach, each constraint covers a use case, the roles are
the identified actors for the use case and the resources are the resources
involved in the use case.
For example, the ITSOBank sample application has a use case: customer
transfer. The actors that can use this use case are manager and clerk. The
resources are: transfer/customertransfer.html, servlet/Transfer,
transfer/transferresults.jsp. The listed elements can define the appropriate
resource collection for the right group of roles. Of course, this is only one
approach and it might not be the best in every case.
The purpose of this section is to point out the problem with the first two
approaches and make you think about this issue.
You can also protect your resources based on URL patterns using a security
reverse proxy in your infrastructure, for example via Tivoli Access Manager’s
WebSEAL.
Struts security
Struts is a very powerful framework to implement the Model-View-Controller
design pattern for a Web application. The framework at this stage does not
provide security functions, it leaves the issue to the J2EE Web module to handle
security. Struts does not carry any security problems, but there are certain
considerations you have to keep in mind.
The reason why the security issue arises is because Struts is a single access
point under the cover, for multiple application functions. One single servlet
handles all actions implementing the command pattern.
70 IBM WebSphere V5.0 Security Handbook