IBM WebSphere V5.0 Security - CGISecurity

If the user in role 'A' accesses /helloworld/helloEurope.html he will get anauthorization error saying that the user is not in the role of 'B', but we defined thatrole ‘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.htmlAs you see, Constraint ‘Y’ overrules Constraint ‘X’ in this situation.The other approach would be to map roles to resources, and define theauthorized roles for each resource. Obviously, this is not a possible solutionsince an application probably has more resources than we want to set up one byone.A solution, the same that we applied to the ITSOBank sample application, couldbe to reuse the use cases for the application and follow them to define securityconstraints. In this approach, each constraint covers a use case, the roles arethe identified actors for the use case and the resources are the resourcesinvolved in the use case.For example, the ITSOBank sample application has a use case: customertransfer. The actors that can use this use case are manager and clerk. Theresources are: transfer/customertransfer.html, servlet/Transfer,transfer/transferresults.jsp. The listed elements can define the appropriateresource collection for the right group of roles. Of course, this is only oneapproach and it might not be the best in every case.The purpose of this section is to point out the problem with the first twoapproaches and make you think about this issue.You can also protect your resources based on URL patterns using a securityreverse proxy in your infrastructure, for example via Tivoli Access Manager’sWebSEAL.Struts securityStruts is a very powerful framework to implement the Model-View-Controllerdesign pattern for a Web application. The framework at this stage does notprovide security functions, it leaves the issue to the J2EE Web module to handlesecurity. Struts does not carry any security problems, but there are certainconsiderations you have to keep in mind.The reason why the security issue arises is because Struts is a single accesspoint under the cover, for multiple application functions. One single servlethandles all actions implementing the command pattern.70 IBM WebSphere V5.0 Security Handbook