Archive for September, 2011

Jersey 1.9.1 Released

September 16th, 2011

Over the past two weeks, I’ve been working with Pavel on finalizing and staging the bits for the hands-on-lab on OAuth, we are going to do at this year’s JavaOne. As part of that, I had to make a few more clean-ups in the Jersey OAuth client library, so we decided to make a branch for 1.9.1 and make those clean-ups along with some other small fixes there. Now, 2 weeks after 1.9, we released it. This is the release we’ll be using for JavaOne and although the release cycle was so short, it does have two nice additions worth highlighting.

  • Un-/marshalling collection types
    Until 1.9.1, JAXB un-/marshalling in Jersey worked only for Collection and List interfaces. I.e. if your resource method returned (or took as a parameter) Collection<Foo> or List<Foo> (where Foo was a JAXB bean), de-/serialization from/to XML/JSON would work, but if it returned LinkedList<Foo> or Set<Foo> or any other Collection subtype, it would not work. This is fixed in 1.9.1 and you can now return and retrieve any well-known interfaces that extend Collection (such as Set, Queue, etc.) and their implementations which have default public constructor.
  • PostReplaceFilter improvements
    PostReplaceFilter can be used to support clients which can’t send the full range of HTTP methods. It enables converting POST requests to other methods such as PUT or DELETE. If a POST request comes with a different method specified in X-HTTP-Method-Override header, the filter will replace POST in the request with that specified method. This has been in Jersey for a while, but only supported method overriding using the X-HTTP-Method-Override header. In 1.9.1 you can now use “_method” query parameter as well, and when overriding POST to GET the filter will convert all the form parameters to query parameters. Whether both header and query parameter are looked at by the filter (or only the header or only the query parameter) is configurable. Thanks to gk5885Fredy Nagy and Florian Hars for sharing their views and patches.
You can see the full list of changes in our changelog. For more info on Jersey see http://jersey.java.net.

Jersey and Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)

September 14th, 2011

About two weeks back we released Jersey 1.9. See Jakub’s blog for more info on what’s new. One thing Jakub didn’t mention is that Jersey 1.9 also includes a new server side filter for Cross Site Request Forgery prevention. I won’t go into the details on what CSRF is – please refer to the OWASP CSRF page for that. Unfortunately, the generally recommended prevention is to generate per-request or per-session tokens on the server side, which client then has to include in its subsequent requests. This is quite easy to implement and there are servlet filters for doing that, however it does require a session state to be maintained and thus is not very RESTful. I was trying to implement something that would not require a session. After some searching I found the following two papers which both suggest there is a solution which works, and is not based on sessions:

The main idea is to check the presence of a custom header (agreed-upon between the server and a client – e.g. X-CSRF or X-Requested-By) in all state-changing requests coming from the client. The value of the header does not really matter. It works, because the browser would not send custom headers unless the web page makes a request using XMLHttpRequest, which only allows requests to the same site.

So, in Jersey 1.9 we added a server-side filter which does exactly that. You can find it here: server-side CsrfProtectionFilter.java

And, to make it easy to build clients, a corresponding client filter (that attaches the custom header to all potentially state-changing requests) is there as well: client-side CsrfProtectionFilter.

This can be further extended based on the feedback – we may add a check for the Referrer header and eventually even implement the session-based solution as an available configuration option. Just let us know, if you have an opinion.