Oauth Library for Jersey – Percent Encoding Fix

I’m happy to report that we’ve fixed an issue in the percent encoding step of our OAuth signature library for the Jersey framework. The issue reported was caused by the fact that we were using Java’s URLEncoder and URLDecoder classes to compute OAuth’s signature base string. Unfortunately those classes do not perform an RFC3986 compliant encoding which is required in OAuth. The main difference is that a space character will be encoded as a + when we need it to be escaped as a %20 (more info here).

To fix this, we’ve chosen to leverage Jersey’s UriComponent class. There is one notable difference though with how one would encode a URI (see here for a very detailed explanation of URIs): OAuth says that the signature base string is built by concatenating the request method, the request URL and the normalized parameters (with & to separate them) and that those elements must be encoded (prior to concatenation). In effect we are re-encoding elements that are already encoded. As Paul noted, it’s as if we wanted to pass the signature base string in a URI… I remember this possibility was mentioned in conversations about debugging OAuth deployment but that’s the only case I remember for this.

Anyway, to illustrate this, below is the piece of code where the bulk of the action happens:


StringBuffer buf = new StringBuffer(request.getRequestMethod().toUpperCase());
URI uri = constructRequestURL(request);
String tp = uri.getScheme();
buf.append('&').append(UriComponent.encode(tp, UriComponent.Type.SCHEME));
tp = uri.getAuthority();
buf.append("%3A%2F%2F").append(UriComponent.encode(tp, UriComponent.Type.AUTHORITY));
tp = uri.getPath();
buf.append(UriComponent.encode(tp, UriComponent.Type.PATH_SEGMENT));
buf.append('&').append(UriComponent.encode(normalizeParameters(request, params), UriComponent.Type.QUERY_PARAM));


Our testing code now also includes elements with spaces to make sure we got it right (thanks to Michael Werle).

 

OAuth 1.0a is Available

Thanks to my colleague Hua Cui, our OAuth implementation for OpenSSO is now upgraded to the latest 1.0a revision of the spec. There is no legacy support for (now deprecated) the 1.0 version (the version field hasn’t been changed in OAuth which, to me at least, does suggest deprecation of the previous release).

Since the signature mechanism in itself is not changed, there’s no update necessary to our Jersey OAuth signature library.

Give it a try!

 

OAuth in Jersey: RSA-SHA1 support is in!

In previous posts, I mentioned we have implemented an OAuth signature library for Jersey (the JAX-RS reference implementation). This signature library sports client and server filters to insulate the application from most of the OAuth signature process (signing on the client side and verifying the signature on the server). Our main goal is to allow Jersey developers to adopt OAuth to secure their messages. Our initial need though, was for our OpenSSO project which now includes an OAuth Token Service.

In doing some testing on the OpenSSO use of OAuth, we noted there’s was a bug in the server verification code of an RSA signature. I’m happy to announce that the fix is in so you can now happily use RSA-SHA1 to secure OAuth messages (in OpenSSO or simply using Jersey). Similarly to HMAC-SHA1, we have created a comprehensive test for the RSA-SHA1, reusing the same test case used here. If you want to use the library, you should take a look at the test source code.

One thing to note is that all signature algorithm implementations (HMAC-SHA1, RSA-SHA1, more could be added.) use the same interface object class OAuthSignature method. The challenge with that is that those algorithm require different types of secrets (as reflected in the OAuth spec). It is especially true for key-based algorithms like RSA-SHA1 where the sign() method requires a different secret (the private key) than the verify() method (called by the server, using the client’s public key).

In our implementation both methods take an OAuthSecrets object in argument. In the case of a public/private key-based algorithm, this object is expected to contain the private key (or public key in the verification case) within the consumerSecret field. This is indicated in the library’s Javadoc.

On the client side, signing (with RSA-SHA1) a message is quite simple. All you need to sign your message is three elements: the request, the OAuth parameters and your public key. The code below shows how you’d do that with Jersey:

        OAuthParameters params = new OAuthParameters().realm(REALM).
         consumerKey(CONSUMER_KEY).
         signatureMethod(RSA_SIGNATURE_METHOD).timestamp(RSA_TIMESTAMP).
         nonce(RSA_NONCE).version(VERSION);

        OAuthSecrets secrets = new OAuthSecrets().consumerSecret(RSA_PRIVKEY);

        OAuthSignature.sign(request, params, secrets);

On the server side, we retrieve the parameters from the request and use the public key (obtained from the client’s X509 certificate). A short example would be:

        params = new OAuthParameters();
        params.readRequest(request);
        secrets = new OAuthSecrets().consumerSecret(RSA_CERTIFICATE);
        assertTrue(OAuthSignature.verify(request, params, secrets));

 

OAuth support: a summary of our work

A quick summary of the OAuth support we’ve recently added in a couple of key projects.

If you’re into RESTful web services and OAuth, we have implemented an extension to the Jersey project (the JAX-RS Reference Implementation). This extension allows for the signing and/or the verification of OAuth 1.0 based requests. It is based on a digital signature library accessed by server and client filters. Detailed information can be found here.

For people interested in a more integrated solution, we have also implemented a module for the open source project OpenSSO to supports OAuth as an authentication module. This module handles the Service Provider side, that is: token issuance, token & message verification as well as SSO session handling (to bridge with other protocols). This module is, for now, an extension to OpenSSO. In other words it is not yet part of the core OpenSSO and should be considered as more experimental. Beside the Java doc, a good source of information on this can be found in this article. There’s also Pat’s demo at Community One this year.

If you’re so inclined, give it a try – any feedback is more than welcome!