S90.20 Practice Questions

Question 1

Services A, B, and C reside in Service Inventory A and Services D, E, and F reside in Service Inventory B .Service B is an authentication broker that issues WS-Trust based SAML tokens to Services A and C upon receiving security credentials from Services A and C .Service E is an authentication broker that issues WS-Trust based SAML tokens to Services D and F upon receiving security credentials from Services D and E .Service B uses the Service Inventory A identify store to validate the security credentials of Services A and C .Service E uses the Service Inventory B identity store to validate the security credentials of Services D and F .To date, the two service inventories have existed independently from each other. However, a requirement has emerged that the services in Service Inventory A need to be able to use the services in Service Inventory B, and vice versa. How can cross-service inventory message exchanges be enabled with minimal changes to the existing service inventory architectures and without introducing new security mechanisms?

Accepted Answer

The current security mechanism already fulfills the requirement because SAML tokens can be used across multiple security-domains. The only change required is for each authentication broker to be configured so that it issues service inventory-specific assertions for SAML tokens originating from other service inventories.

Answer

Because SAML tokens cannot be used across multiple security domains, authentication brokers C and E need to be replaced with one single authentication broker so that one token issuer is used for all services across both of the service inventories.

Answer

The individual domain service inventories need to be combined into one enterprise service inventory. The Service Perimeter Guard pattern can be applied to establish a contact point for request messages originating from outside the service inventory. Within the service inventory, services no longer need to be authenticated because they are all part of the same trust boundary.

Answer

The Trusted Subsystem pattern is applied to encapsulate Services B and E using a central utility service that balances request and response messages exchanged between Services B and E, depending on which service inventory the messages originate from. The utility service also contains transformation logic to ensure that the SAML tokens issued by Services B and E are compatible. This guarantees that an issued SAML token can be used across Service Inventories A and B without further need for runtime conversion.

Question 2

Service Consumer A sends a request message to Service A (1) after which Service A retrieves financial data from Database A (2). Service A then sends a request message with the retrieved data to Service B (3). Service B exchanges messages with Service C (4) and Service D (5), which perform a series of calculations on the data and return the results to Service A .Service A uses these results to update Database A (7) and finally sends a response message to Service Consumer A (8). Component B has direct, independent access to Database A and is fully trusted by Database A .Both Component B and Database A reside within Organization A .Service Consumer A and Services A, B, C, and D are external to the organizational boundary of Organization A .

Component B is considered a mission critical program that requires guaranteed access to and fast response from Database A .Service A was recently the victim of a denial of service attack, which resulted in Database A becoming unavailable for extended periods of time (which further compromised Component B). Additionally, Services B, C, and D have repeatedly been victims of malicious intermediary attacks, which have further destabilized the performance of Service A .How can this architecture be improved to prevent these attacks?

Accepted Answer

A utility service is created to encapsulate Database A and to assume responsibility for authenticating all access to the database by Service A and any other service consumers. Due to the mission critical requirements of Component B, the utility service further contains logic that strictly limits the amount of concurrent requests made to Database A from outside the organizational boundary. The Data Confidentiality and Data Origin Authentication patterns are applied to all message exchanged within the external service composition in order to establish message-layer security.

Answer

Service Consumer A generates a private/public key pair and sends this public key and identity information to Service A .Service A generates its own private/public key pair and sends it back to Service Consumer A .Service Consumer A uses the public key of Service A to encrypt a randomly generated session key and then sign the encrypted session key with the private key. The encrypted, signed session key is sent to Service A .Now, this session key can be used for secure message-layer communication between Service Consumer A and Service A .The Service Perimeter Guard pattern is applied to establish a perimeter service that encapsulates Database A in order to authenticate all external access requests.

Answer

Services B, C, and D randomly generate Session Key K, and use this key to encrypt request and response messages with symmetric encryption. Session Key K is further encrypted itself asymmetrically. When each service acts as a service consumer by invoking another service, it decrypts the encrypted Session Key K and the invoked service uses the key to decrypt the encrypted response. Database A is replicated so that only the replicated version of the database can be accessed by Service A and other external service consumers.

Answer

The Direct Authentication pattern is applied so that when Service Consumer A submits security credentials, Service A will be able to evaluate the credentials in order to authenticate the request message. If the request message is permitted, Service A invokes the other services and accesses Database A .Database A is replicated so that only the replicated version of the database can be accessed by Service A and other external service consumers.

Question 3

Service A provides a data access capability that can be used by a variety of service consumers. The database records accessed by Service A are classified as either private or public. There are two types of service consumers that use Service A:

Service consumers with public access permissions (allowed to access only public data records) and service consumers with private access permissions (allowed to access all data records). For performance reasons the Service A architecture uses a single database, named Database A .Each record in Database A is classified as either private or public. After Service A is invoked by a service consumer (1), it authenticates the request message using an identity store and retrieves the corresponding authorization (2, 3). Once authorized, the service consumer's request is submitted to Database A (4), which then returns the requested data (5) If the service consumer has private access permissions, all of the returned data is included in Service A's response message (6). If the service consumer has public access permissions, then Service A first filters the data in order to remove all unauthorized private data records before sending to the response message to the service consumer (6). In addition to retrieving data, Service A's data access capability can be used to update database records. An investigation recently revealed an information leakage problem that can occur when service consumers with public access permissions attempt to update the ID value of a database record The ID values of all database records (private or public) must be unique. When a service consumer with public access permissions updates a public database record with an ID value that is already assigned to a private database record, the database returns an error message describing this conflict. This error text reveals confidential information by stating that the ID value submitted by the service consumer with public access permissions already exists within a private database record. What steps can be taken to avoid this problem while preserving the requirement that all database records (private and public) have unique ID values?

Accepted Answer

The Exception Shielding pattern is applied to replace the error description text before a response message is returned to the service consumer. Furthermore, the ID value of all database records is appended with a code indicating whether the database record is private or public

Answer

The database rules are changed so that the ID value of database records no longer needs to be unique. As a further precaution, the Service A logic is changed to disallow the update of private database records by service consumers with only public access permissions.

Answer

The service consumer's request message containing the ID value can be encrypted by inserting the private key of the service consumer into the data. Because all service consumers have different private keys, this approach will lead to different encrypted values, even if the plain text ID values are the same. As a result, two data items with the same encrypted unique identifier cannot exist.

Answer

When Service A detects that a service consumer with public access permissions has submitted an ID value that already exists within a private database record, it stores the service consumer's ID value in a temporary database and returns a response message indicating that the update was successful. A notification message is then sent to a human database administrator who manually contacts the owner of the service consumer in order to explain that the ID value submitted cannot be accepted because it already exists within a private database record.

Question 4

Service A has two specific service consumers, Service Consumer A and Service Consumer B (1). Both service consumers are required to provide security credentials in order for Service A to perform authentication using an identity store (2). If a service consumer's request message is successfully authenticated, Service A processes the request by exchanging messages with Service B (3) and then Service C (4). With each of these message exchanges, Service A collects data necessary to perform a query against historical data stored in a proprietary legacy system. Service A's request to the legacy system must be authenticated (5). The legacy system only provides access control using a single account. If the request from Service A is permitted, it will be able to access all of the data stored in the legacy system. If the request is not permitted, none of the data stored in the legacy system can be accessed. Upon successfully retrieving the requested data (6), Service A generates a response message that is sent back to either Service Consumer A or B .The legacy system is also used independently by Service D without requiring any authentication. Furthermore, the legacy system has no auditing feature and therefore cannot record when data access from Service A or Service D occurs. If the legacy system encounters an error when processing a request, it generates descriptive error codes. This service composition architecture needs to be upgraded in order to fulfill the following new security requirements:

1. Service Consumers A and B have different access permissions and therefore, data received from the legacy system must be filtered prior to issuing a response message to one of these two service consumers.

2. Service Consumer A's request messages must be digitally signed, whereas request messages from Service Consumer B do not need to be digitally signed. Which of the following statements describes a solution that fulfills these requirements?

Accepted Answer

The Trusted Subsystem pattern is applied by introducing a utility service that encapsulates the legacy system. To support-access by service consumers issuing request messages with and without digital signatures, policy alternatives are added to Service A's service contract. Service A authenticates the service consumer's request against the identity store and verifies compliance to the policy. Service A then creates a signed SAML assertion containing an authentication statement and the authorization decision. The utility service inspects the signed SAML assertions to authenticate the service consumer and then access the legacy system using a single account. The data returned by the legacy system is filtered by the utility service, according to the information in the SAML assertions.

Answer

The Trusted Subsystem pattern is applied by introducing a utility service that encapsulates the legacy system. Two different policies are created for Service A's service contract, only one requiring a digitally signed request message. The utility service accesses the legacy system using the single account. Service A authenticates the service consumer using the identity store and, if successfully authenticated, Service A send a message containing the service consumer's credentials to the utility service. The identity store is also used by the utility service to authenticate request messages received from Service A .The utility service evaluates the level of authorization of the original service consumer and filters data received from the legacy system accordingly.

Answer

The Trusted Subsystem pattern is applied by introducing a utility service that encapsulates the legacy system. After successful authentication, Service A creates a signed SAML assertion stating what access level the service consumer has. The utility service inspects the signed SAML assertion in order to authenticate Service A .The utility service accesses the legacy system using the account information originally provided by Service Consumer A or B .The utility service evaluates the level of authorization of the original service consumer and filters data received from the legacy system accordingly.

Answer

The Trusted Subsystem pattern is applied together with the Message Screening pattern by introducing a utility service that-encapsulated the legacy system and contains message screening logic. First, the utility service evaluates the incoming request messages to ensure that it is digitally signed, when necessary. After successful verification the request message is authenticated, and Service A performs the necessary processing. The data returned from the legacy system is filtered by the utility service's message screening logic in order to ensure that only authorized data is returned to Service Consumers A and B .

Question 5

Service A provides a customized report generating capability. Due to infrastructure limitations, the number of service consumers permitted to access Service A concurrently is strictly controlled. Service A validates request messages based on the supplied credentials (1). If the authentication of the request message is successful, Service A sends a message to Service B (2) to retrieve the required data from Database A (3). Service A stores the response from Service B (4) in memory and then issues a request message to Service C (5). Service C retrieves a different set of data from Database A (6) and sends the result back to Service A (7). Service A consolidates the data received from Services B and C and sends the generated report in the response message to the service consumer (8). It has been discovered that attackers have been gaining access to confidential data exchanged between Service A and Service B, and between Service A and its service consumers. What changes can be made to this service composition architecture in order to counter this threat?

Accepted Answer

None of the above

Answer

Apply the Service Perimeter Guard pattern in order to protect message exchanges between Service A and its service-consumers. Apply the Direct Authentication pattern in order to protect message exchanges between Service A and Service B .

Answer

Apply the Direct Authentication pattern in order to protect message exchanges between Service A and its service consumers and between Service A and Service B .This approach will establish a password-based authentication mechanism that relies on a local identity store and will therefore prevent access by attackers.

Answer

Apply the Data Origin Authentication pattern to protect the final report sent by Service A to its service consumer. Service A can generate a message digest of the final report, after which it can sign the digest with its own private key. It then can send both the final report and the signed-message digest to its service consumer. This service consumer can generate its own message digest, decrypt the signed digest using the public key of Service A (which proves that Service A sent the message), and then compare the two digests. If the digests match, it guarantees that the final report was not tampered with during transmission.

Free Arcitura Education S90.20 Exam Practice Questions & Explanations