Yes, Oracle API Gateway Can Protect Your Web Application, Too by Marcelo Parisi

November 7, 2015 Leave a comment

 

clip_image001This article by Marcelo Parisi examines basic concepts of web application security using Oracle API Gateway, using an XSS Injection issue and an SQL Injection issue to demonstrate how Oracle API Gateway can bring value to these scenarios.

The topic of Web application security never gets old. Some of the main associated challenges are related to detection and prevention of XSS Injection and SQL Injection. Such vulnerabilities are usually exploited through web application url parameters or user input fields in HTML forms.

While Oracle API Gateway has been used mainly to protect Web Services, RESTFul APIs and other kinds of services, its filtering and hardening mechanisms make it a powerful tool in a web application protection scenario.

In this article we’ll examine some basic concepts of web application security using Oracle API Gateway. We’ll work on an XSS Injection issue and on a SQL Injection issue to demonstrate how Oracle API Gateway can bring value to these scenarios.

The applications used here to demonstrate the issues were custom made for this article and are deployed in an Oracle WebLogic Server 12c environment with no clustering. The SQL Injection demonstration application uses a datasource connected to an Oracle Database 11gR2. The application reads data from the database’s simple three-column table and prints in the screen. The XSS Injection application prints only the user form input field value in the screen. These applications have no real-life use and are only some code samples for demonstration purposes.

We’ll not be covering infrastructure installation in this article. We’ll be using two servers, one with Oracle API Gateway installed on it, and the other one with the application running on Oracle WebLogic Server 12c.

Infrastructure

As mentioned before, building the infrastructure is out of this document’s scope. In this section we’ll just see what the infrastructure used to demonstrate the concepts looks like. Read the complete article here.

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Building a Scalable, Highly Available Oracle API Gateway 11g Infrastructure in a Cloud Environment by Marcelo Parisi

May 29, 2015 Leave a comment

clip_image002Introduction

One of the major challenges that companies face in adopting a cloud computing platform is the secure provisioning of services in the cloud. Oracle API Gateway (OAG) 11g can be a very powerful tool in this sense, since it focuses on service protection, with authentication mechanisms, message encryption, and security/policy functionalities.

In this article, we will see how to create a cloud-based OAG infrastructure, with high-availability and scalability support. Both high-availability and scalability operations will be covered here. We’ll be using virtual machines (VMs) and storage concepts, along with OAG and Oracle Traffic Director (OTD). While a physical load balancer will also be necessary, its configuration is beyond the scope of this article.

The service infrastructure—Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle Service Bus or any other kind of service provider environment that needs to be exposed in a secure manner through the environment we’ll be building—will also not be covered in this article.

This article assumes a Network File System (NFS) v4 and Network Information Service/Lightweight Directory Service Protocol (NIS/LDAP) compliant environment. If you don’t support it, the article will indicate the changes so that you can run on a NFSv3 environment without NIS/LDAP.

There is no capacity planning or sizing work done on this article. The number of CPUs, memory and filesystem size are all just for demonstration purposes and should be revisited in a production environment.

OAG and OTD documentation should always be consulted. This document is not intended to replace any of the product’s official documentation.

Finally, please note that OTD is supported only in Exalogic environments.

Infrastructure Architecture

In this article, we’re going to build a brand new infrastructure from scratch to support this environment. We’ll consider two VMs for OTD and, initially, three VMs for OAG, one of them for administration purposes only. The environment infrastructure architecture will resemble the architecture in Figure 1, below:

As you can see, we have high availability on both the OTD layer and the OAG layer. Both layers are scalable either horizontally or vertically. This article discusses scalability only on the OAG layer.

We’re going to create five VMs—three for OAG, with Oracle Linux 5.6; two with Oracle Linux 6.6 for OTD. I suggest using VM Templates or cloning to make this task easier. The VMs’ configuration should resemble the table in Figure 2, below: Read the complete article here.

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For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

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