So what credentials do you need?

One of the features that I am very proud of in the HTTP Analyzer in JDeveloper is the ability to test a SOAP service with the minimum of fuss. Rather than having to configure security headers and understand WS-Policy we make use of the WLS JAX-WS client to read and interpret the policies defined in the WSDL and then apply abstracted credentials.

It turns out that this feature is very popular; but there is some confusion about just what information you might need to provide for a particular policy. So here is a simple summary of what is required for what type of policy.

Username Token

The simplest page just ask for a username and password. You are going to need this for policies that contains the phrase usernametoken, username, UNT or even HttpBasic and HttpDigest. The policy dictates where the values end up whether they be in an HTTP header or a WS-Security SOAP header.

X509 Certificates

The X509 panel is the most powerful and the most misunderstood. On this panel you can define a set of certificates and keys for both the client and the server.

The simplest version of this panel would be one that just contains the server key store. This is sufficient in most policy to be able to send a server an encrypted message and receive a message back. (In the most common case the server certificate is used to encrypt a symmetrical key, most likely AES,  that can be used to decrypt the message being received.)

You will also need this to verify messages that are signed by the server.

If you need to server to trust that you send the message with signing then you have to provide a identity in the form of a Public/Private key that can be used to encrypt the outgoing hashes used to sign the message. 

This client identity can also be used in leu of the username token described earlier. In the most common policy I have worked with the CN of the public certificate is used as the user identity. 

Http Keystores

Some policies will make use of a Https channel to send messages, and like the x509 certificate panel the settings come in both client and server side store.

In the simplest case this panel will just be configured with a "Trusted Certificates Keystore", so this will list with certificates or certificate signing authorities are going to be trusted by the analyser. In order to make this as easy as possible by default we append the "CA" certificates that come with Java so you can by default connect to most publish websites without any further configuration.

This will normally be enough unless the policy is defined as 2-Way HTTPS, most of the OWSM https policies I have worked with are 2-Way by default. The WLS ones tend to specify this explicitly. In the 2-Way case you again need to prove the identity of the client, and the only way of doing this is going to be with a Public/Private key that the server trusts.

STS Configuration

The final panel regards working with policies that require SAML tokens; JDeveloper is unable to issue SAML tokens itself so instead it need to get hold of a token from a STS store that is trusted by the server you are in contact with.

In this case you need to specify the URL of the endpoint of the STS service along with a security policy that will match that on the sever side. This is unfortunately a static list and has to be figured out manually. Perhaps this is something that can be improved on in a later release.

On important feature to note is that when connecting to the STS store the analyser will be using values from the other three panels that we have discussed. This might be important if you are having trouble setting up a connection.