Book Image

RESTful Java Web Services - Third Edition

By : Balachandar Bogunuva Mohanram, Jobinesh Purushothaman
Book Image

RESTful Java Web Services - Third Edition

By: Balachandar Bogunuva Mohanram, Jobinesh Purushothaman

Overview of this book

Representational State Transfer (REST) is a simple yet powerful software architecture style to create lightweight and scalable web services. The RESTful web services use HTTP as the transport protocol and can use any message formats, including XML, JSON(widely used), CSV, and many more, which makes it easily inter-operable across different languages and platforms. This successful book is currently in its 3rd edition and has been used by thousands of developers. It serves as an excellent guide for developing RESTful web services in Java. This book attempts to familiarize the reader with the concepts of REST. It is a pragmatic guide for designing and developing web services using Java APIs for real-life use cases following best practices and for learning to secure REST APIs using OAuth and JWT. Finally, you will learn the role of RESTful web services for future technological advances, be it cloud, IoT or social media. By the end of this book, you will be able to efficiently build robust, scalable, and secure RESTful web services using Java APIs.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Key considerations for securing RESTful services

In the previous sections, we covered in detail the various techniques for securing the RESTful services. Some of the best practices, apart from authentication and authorization, that are worth considering for securing RESTful services are listed as follows:

  • A whitelist is a list of allowable actions on an entity; it is the reverse of blacklisting. It is important for a RESTful service to mention only the allowable action verbs such as GET/POST, so the other actions, even if triggered by the client, are denied.
  • Validation of the URL is a must for RESTful services, as attackers tamper with the URL to perform injection attacks. Avoid encoding sensitive information in the URL.
  • Ensure that the RESTful service definition includes the allowed content type.
  • Ensure that the perimeter-level security is enabled using firewalls for enterprise...