Arcitura Education S90.20 Exam - Topic 1 Question 1 Discussion

Question

Service A is a publically accessible service that provides free multimedia retrieval capabilities to a range of service consumers. To carry out this functionality, Service A is first invoked by Service Consumer A (1). Based on the nature of the request message received from Service Consumer A, Service A either invokes Service B or Service C .When Service B is invoked by Service A (2A) it retrieves data from publicly available sources (not shown) and responds with the requested data (3A). When Service C is invoked by Service A (2B) it retrieves data from proprietary sources within the IT enterprise (not shown) and responds with the requested data (3B). After receiving a response from Service B or Service C, Service A sends the retrieved data to Service Consumer A (4). Service B does not require service consumers to be authenticated, but Service C does require authentication of service consumers. The service contract for Service A therefore uses WS-Policy alternative policies in order to express the two different authentication requirements to Service Consumer A .When Service Consumer A sends a request message (1), Service A determines whether the request requires the involvement of Service C and then checks to ensure that the necessary security credentials were received as part of the message. If the credentials provided by Service Consumer A are verified. Service A creates a signed SAML assertion and sends it with the request message to Service C (2B) This authentication information is protected by public key encryption However, responses to Service Consumer A's request message (3B, 4) are not encrypted for performance reasons. The owner of Service C is planning two changes to the service architecture:

1. A fee will be charged to Service Consumer A (or any service consumer) using Service C .2. The response messages issued by Service C need to be secured in order to prevent unauthorized access. An analysis of Service C's usage statistics reveals that a group of service consumers specifically request the retrieval of multimedia data on a frequent basis. To promote the usage of Service C to these types of service consumers, the owner of Service C plans to offer a special discount by allowing unlimited multimedia retrievals for a fixed monthly price. Service consumers that do not subscribe to this promotion will need to pay for each request individually. It is anticipated that the new promotion will significantly increase the usage of Service C .The owner of Service C therefore wants to ensure that the security added to the response messages has a minimal impact on Service C's runtime performance. What steps can be taken to fulfill these requirements?

Alex · Accepted Answer

A) Use symmetric session keys so that for each response message, Service C generates a session key and encrypts the-response message using this session key. The session key is then encrypted (using the service consumer's public key) and attached to the encrypted response. A single session key can then be used by Service C for communication with all service consumers that subscribe to the promotion.

Alex · Answer

B) Because the services in this service composition already rely on public key encryption to provide authentication, Service C can provide message confidentiality by encrypting the response message with Service Consumer A's public key. This will ensure that only the intended recipient, in possession of the corresponding private key, can decrypt the response message. To further reduce the performance impact of encryption, Service C can generate a new public-private key pair to be used by service consumers subscribed to the promotion. By securely distributing the private key to each of these service consumers, Service C only needs to encrypt the response messages once with the public key.

Alex · Answer

C) Design Service C to generate a message digest of the response message and encrypt it with the service consumer's publickey. Because the message digest is typically small, the performance of public key encryption is acceptable. This approach also ensures that only the service consumer can decrypt the response message using the corresponding private key.

Alex · Answer

D) Design the service composition architecture so that the encryption of the response messages is performed by Service B and Service C .To reduce the performance impact, a policy can be added to Service A's service contract in order to require the encryption of all response messages, regardless of the type of service consumer making the request. Further, a new utility service can be added to the service composition. This service can be responsible for obtaining the public key of the service consumer and forwarding the key along with the request message to the appropriate service (Service B or Service C). The service receiving the message can then encrypt the response message with the received public key. Service A can then forward the encrypted response to the service consumer. This approach ensures that only authorized service consumers will be able to access response messages.