Is it possible to secure a ColdFusion 11 REST Service with HTTP BASIC Authentication? - rest

Question

I am setting up a simple REST Service in ColdFusion 11. The web server is IIS 8.5 on Windows Server 2012R2.
This REST Service needs to be secured to prevent unauthorized users from accessing/writing data. For the time being, there will be only one authorized user, so I want to keep authentication/authorization as simple as possible. My initial thought is to use HTTP BASIC Authentication.
Here's the setup for the REST Service:
Source Directory: C:\web\site1\remoteapi\
REST path: inventory
To implement this, I configured the source directory of the REST Service in IIS to authorize only one user, disable Anonymous authentication, and enable Basic authentication.
When I call the source directory directly in a browser (i.e. http://site1/remoteapi/inventory.cfc?method=read), I am presented with the Basic authentication dialog.
However, when I attempt to request the REST path (http://site1/rest/inventory/), I am not challenged at all.
How can I implement HTTP BASIC authentication on the REST path?

Answer 1

So, due to the need to get this done without much delay, I went ahead and using some principles from Ben Nadel's website, I wrote my own authentication into the onRequestStart() method of the REST Service's Application.cfc. Here is the basic code, though it uses hard-coded values in the VARIABLES scope to validate the username and password and also does not include any actual "authorization" setting:
public boolean function onRequestStart(required string targetPage) {
LOCAL.Response = SUPER.onRequestStart(ARGUMENTS.targetpage);
if (!StructKeyExists(GetHTTPRequestData().Headers, "Authorization")) {
cfheader(
name="WWW-Authenticate",
value="Basic realm=""REST API Access"""
);
LOCAL.RESTResponse = {
status = 401,
content = {Message = "Unauthorized"}
};
restSetResponse(LOCAL.RESTResponse);
}
else {
LOCAL.IsAuthenticated = true;
LOCAL.EncodedCredentials =
GetToken( GetHTTPRequestData().Headers.Authorization, 2, " " );
// Credential string is not Base64
if ( !ArrayLen(
REMatch(
"^([A-Za-z0-9+/]{4})*([A-Za-z0-9+/]{4}|[A-Za-z0-9+/]{3}=|[A-Za-z0-9+/]{2}==)$",
LOCAL.EncodedCredentials
)
)
) {
LOCAL.IsAuthenticated = false;
}
else {
// Convert Base64 to String
LOCAL.Credentials =
ToString(ToBinary( LOCAL.EncodedCredentials ));
LOCAL.Username = GetToken( LOCAL.Credentials, 1, ":" );
LOCAL.Password = GetToken( LOCAL.Credentials, 2, ":" );
if ( LOCAL.Username != VARIABLES.CREDENTIALS.Username
|| LOCAL.Password != VARIABLES.CREDENTIALS.Password
) {
LOCAL.IsAuthenticated = false;
}
}
if (!LOCAL.IsAuthenticated) {
LOCAL.Response = {
status = 403,
content = {Message = "Forbidden"}
};
restSetResponse(LOCAL.Response);
}
}
return LOCAL.Response;
}