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Hi,

I have a question about securing web services. The web services we have created are for internal use only. They are written in Java and running in Websphere 5.1 Express on the system i. I know this is an unsupported version. Upgrading isn't an option right now. The reason we need to secure them is we will be implementing some that create and update records. We don't want developers to call these services in production. Up until now, they have just returned data so it hasn't been an issue.

The web services that update records will be in different EAR files and therefore are different applications in Websphere from the ones that just read data. There are only certain machines that should be able to call the production services. Our web site is written in .NET, so we want the machine running the .NET code to be able to call the web services. From my understanding, digital certificates would be one way to solve the problem. Since I haven't worked with digital certificates, I was wondering if there was another approach that would work. I noticed in the Apache configuration, there is the Allow directive. This would allow you specify specific IP addresses to control access. I added an "Allow from xx.x.x.xxx" directive to the end of the httpd.conf file, but that didn't work. It basically didn't allow anyone to connect. After reading the Apache documentation some more, it appears that the "Allow from" directive should be specified within a <Directory> or <Location> or <Files> section. Since there aren't any files in the Apache http server related to the web services, it seems like this method won't work.

Does anyone have an idea if the "Allow from" directive should work? If so, how? If not, what are my options? TIA

Dean Eshleman,
Software Development Architect

Everence Financial
1110 North Main Street
PO Box 483
Goshen, IN 46527
Phone: (574) 533-9515 x3528
www.everence.com




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