2009/12/27

Building a WS-Security enabled SOAP client in Maven2 to the EC2 WSDL using JAX-WS / CXF & WSS4J: tips & tricks

Generating a Java client from the Amazon EC2 WSDL that correctly used WS-Security is not completely simple. This blog post from Glen Mazza contains pretty much all the info you need, but as usual there are many things to trip up over along the way. So, without further ado, my contribution.

My setup: I was using Maven2 to construct a JAR file. Running "mvn generate-sources", then, downloads the WSDL and uses it to generate the EC2 object model in src/main/java.

Blogger doesn't like me quoting XML, so I've put my sample POM at pastebin, here. Inside the cxf-codegen-plugin plugin XML you'll see two specific options, "autoNameResolution", which is needed to prevent naming conflicts with the WSDL, and a link to the JXB binding file for JAXWS, which is needed to generate the correct method signatures

Once this is done, then the security credentials need to be configured. There are some pecularities:

As laid out in this tutorial for the Amazon product advertising API, the X.509 certificate and the private key need to be converted into a pkcs12 -format file before they're usable in Java. This is done using OpenSSL:
openssl pkcs12 -export -name amaws -out aws.pkcs12 -in cert-BLABLABLA.pem -inkey pk-BLABLABLA.pem
At this point, I should admit that I spent hours scratching my head because the generated client (see below) gave me the error "java.io.IOException: DER length more than 4 bytes" when trying to read the PKCS12 file. So I switched to the Java Keystore format by using this command (JDK6 format):
keytool -v -importkeystore -srckeystore aws.pkcs12 -srcstoretype pkcs12 -srcalias amaws -srcstorepass password -deststoretype jks -deststorepass password -destkeystore keystore.jks
...and then received the error "java.io.IOException: Invalid keystore format" instead. At this point I googled a bit, and discovered two ways to verify the integrity of keystores, via openSSL and the Java keytool:
#for pkcs12
openssl pkcs12 -in aws.pkcs12 -info

#for keystore
keytool -v -list -storetype jks -keystore keystore.jks
Both the keystore and pkcs12 file were valid. Then, I realised that I'd put the files in src/test/resources which was being put through a filter before landing in "target". The filter was doing something to the files, so of course they couldn't be read properly. Duh me. I put the key material in a dedicated folder with no filtering and this problem was fixed.

My next problem was the exception "java.io.IOException: exception decrypting data - java.security.InvalidKeyException: Illegal key size". This was solved by downloading the "Java Cryptography Extension (JCE) Unlimited Strength Jurisdiction Policy Files". Simple!

At this point the request was being sent to Amazon! Which then returned a new error message, "Security Header Element is missing the timestamp element". This was because the request didn't have a timestamp. So, I changed the action to TIMESTAMP+SIGNATURE (as seen in the below code sample), at which point I got a new error message: "Timestamp must be signed". This I fixed by setting a custom SIGNATURE_PARTS property also as below.

Finally, once this was all done, and everything was signed, Amazon gave me back the message "AWS was not able to authenticate the request: access credentials are missing". This is exactly the same error that you get when nothing is signed at all, which needless to say is somewhat ambiguous.

At this point I decided that I'd really like to see what was being sent over the wire. The WSDL specifies the port address with an HTTPS URL. However, I had saved the WSDL locally, and changing the URL to HTTP made the result inspectable with the inestimable Wireshark. Despite the request being sent in HTTP, not HTTPS, it was still executed. According to the docs, this should not be!

Anyway, once I was looking at the bytes, I saw that the certificate was only being referred to, not included as specified in the AWS SOAP documents, in this case for SDB. This was fixed by setting the SIG_KEY_ID (key identifier type) property to "DirectReference", which includes the certificate in the request.

...and then it worked. Oh Frabjous Day, Callooh, Callay! The final testcase code that I used is more or less as follows:

package net.ex337.postgrec2.test;

import com.amazonaws.ec2.doc._2009_10_31.AmazonEC2;
import com.amazonaws.ec2.doc._2009_10_31.AmazonEC2PortType;
import com.amazonaws.ec2.doc._2009_10_31.DescribeInstancesType;
import junit.framework.TestCase;

import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.Map;
import javax.security.auth.callback.Callback;
import javax.security.auth.callback.CallbackHandler;
import javax.security.auth.callback.UnsupportedCallbackException;
import org.apache.cxf.endpoint.Client;
import org.apache.cxf.frontend.ClientProxy;
import org.apache.cxf.ws.security.wss4j.WSS4JOutInterceptor;
import org.apache.ws.security.WSPasswordCallback;
import org.apache.ws.security.handler.WSHandlerConstants;

/**
*
* @author Ian
*
*/
public class Testcase_CXF_EC2 extends TestCase {

public void test_01_DescribeInstances() throws Exception {

AmazonEC2PortType port = new AmazonEC2().getAmazonEC2Port();

Client client = ClientProxy.getClient(port);
org.apache.cxf.endpoint.Endpoint cxfEndpoint = client.getEndpoint();

Map outProps = new HashMap();

//the order is important, apparently. Both must be present.
outProps.put(WSHandlerConstants.ACTION, WSHandlerConstants.TIMESTAMP+" "+WSHandlerConstants.SIGNATURE);
//this is the configuration that signs both the body and the timestamp
outProps.put(WSHandlerConstants.SIGNATURE_PARTS,
"{Element}{http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd}Timestamp;"+
"{}{http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/}Body");

//alias, password & properties file for actual signature.
outProps.put(WSHandlerConstants.USER, "amaws");
outProps.put(WSHandlerConstants.PW_CALLBACK_CLASS, PasswordCallBackHandler.class.getName());
outProps.put(WSHandlerConstants.SIG_PROP_FILE, "client_sign.properties");

//necessary to include the certificate in the request
outProps.put(WSHandlerConstants.SIG_KEY_ID, "DirectReference");

cxfEndpoint.getOutInterceptors().add(new WSS4JOutInterceptor(new HashMap(outProps)));

//sample request.

DescribeInstancesType r = new DescribeInstancesType();

System.out.println(port.describeInstances(r));
}

//simple callback handler with the password.
public static class PasswordCallBackHandler implements CallbackHandler {
private Map passwords = new HashMap();

public PasswordCallBackHandler() {
passwords.put("amaws", "password");
}

@Override
public void handle(Callback[] callbacks) throws IOException, UnsupportedCallbackException {
for (int i = 0; i < pc =" (WSPasswordCallback)callbacks[i];" pass =" passwords.get(pc.getIdentifer());"

provider="org.apache.ws.security.components.crypto.Merlin" type="pkcs12" password="password" alias="amaws" file="aws.pkcs12" href="http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/ec2.wsdl">http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/ec2.wsdl.

[I think I mangled somethjing here, will fix it soon]

At this, the method signatures of the generated port abruptly changed to something other, because I forgot to change the wsdlLocation in the JXB binding file. Once I fixed this, it worked again.

Some thoughts:

1) Were I publishing a library for general use in accessing AWS, I would probably not use the direct "symlink" above that always points to the latest version of the WSDL. Instead, I would link deliberately to each version, and in that way always generate ports for each version of the WSDL, this ensuring backwards compatibility.

2) Secondly, I find it inelegant to have to specify the WSDL location in two places (the POM and the binding file), and so I'd like to try and pass the binding file through a filter, using a ${variable} in both places referring to a property in the POM.

3) I find it likewise confusing that the password for the keystore is used in two places, firstly in client_sign.properties and secondly in the CallbackHandler that is invoked from within the bowels of the WSS4JOutInterceptor. In the code above, this is obviously duplicated data, however in the final 'production' version of this code I expect to have the data centralised & the code prettified around it.

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