I am currently reading on Web Services. There is a SOAP tutorial at http://www.w3schools.com/soap/soap_intro.asp . The following paragraph is from that page:
“Today’s applications communicate using Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) between objects like DCOM and CORBA, but HTTP was not designed for this. RPC represents a compatibility and security problem; firewalls and proxy servers will normally block this kind of traffic.”
I don’t understand this. Can someone explain it to me, please. Escpecially I want to know, why RPC is a security problem (at lease over HTTP). Knowing why exactly it is a compatibility problem would be nice, too.
Regarding compatibility, the problem is that it’s not obvious to make something that uses DCOM talk to something that uses CORBA, for example. One of the aims of SOAP is to provide interoperability, so as to harmonize the way this sort of communication is implemented. (There may still be a few glitches regarding interoperability with SOAP, depending on the tools you use.)
Regarding security, for a long time, policies have been made around using port numbers to distinguish applications: if you want to block a certain service (say NNTP), you block its port at the firewall level. It makes it easy to have a coarse control over which applications may be used. What SOAP over HTTP does is pushing the problem at the layer above. You can no longer distinguish which application or service is used from the port number at the TCP level, instead, you would have to be able to analyse the content of the HTTP message and the SOAP messages to authorize certain applications or services.
SOAP mostly uses HTTP POST to send its messages: that’s using HTTP as a transport protocol, whereas HTTP is a transfer protocol, therefore not using HTTP in accordance to the web architecture (SOAP 2 may have attempted to improve the situation). Because almost everyone needs access to the web nowadays, it’s almost guaranteed that the HTTP ports won’t be blocked. That’s effectively using a loop-hole, if no security layer is added on top of this.
This being said, in terms of security, there are advantages in using HTTP for SOAP communication as there is more harmonization in terms of existing HTTP authentication systems for example. What the SOAP/WS-* stack attempts to do is to harmonize the “RPC” communications, independently of the platform. It’s not a case of “SOAP is secure” v.s. “DCOM/CORBA isn’t”, you still have to make use of its security components, e.g. WS-Security, and you may have been able to achieve a reasonable level of security with other systems too.