JMS / MQ confidentiality between clients - jms

I'm designing a system where one server must send messages to lots of independent clients. The clients doesn't know about each other and should not be able to consume, peek or in any other way acquire knowledge about each others messages.
I therefore wonder if JMS / ActiveMq have the ability to control which clients get which messages?
I want all the clients to connect to the same JSM provider (the 'destination') and consume only messages meant for them. This would be a simple setup from the servers point of view.
An alternative would be to acquire webservice endpoints from all the clients and perform ws-calls every time the server have a message for a client. I think this alternative sound 'wrong' as I think ws calls are bloated. There is a great overhead for each ws call, and this server would have to make 1000's of call each day. In my opinion this would be suboptimal for the server...

Short answer: Use Message selector.
Detail answer:
The question doesn't mention about how conversation is initiated. So here my answers for both scenarios.
a) If client initiates the conversation (i.e. Client sends a message to server and waiting for a reply).
This is a request/reply scenario. Messaging/JMS is a decoupled communication system. But request/reply is a common pattern in JMS. It can be implemented using correlation pattern.
A unique identifier(correlation id) is sent part of the request message.
Server receives the message and sets the correlation id in the reply message.
Client uses Message selector to receive the message with the correct correlation id.
b) If server initiates the conversation (i.e. Server sends messages to the clients without client request).
In this case, similar approach can be used.
A fixed client id is assigned to each client.
Server maintains all client ids and sets client id of the recipient as correlation id of the message.
Client uses Message selector to receive the message which has correlation id equals to its client id.
Update about confidentiality.
Following info extracted from this link useful for you to understand JMS security.
JMS does not specify a security
contract or an API for controlling
message confidentiality and integrity.
Security is considered to be a
JMS-provider-specific feature. It is
controlled by a System Administrator
rather than implemented
programmatically or by the J2EE server
runtime.
Two major features of JMS security are Authentication and Authorization. According to my knowledge, JMS security for client access is focusing on protecting the JMS destinations (not the individual messages). As long as a client has access to a destination, the security role assigned to the client is applicable for all the messages belongs to the destination.
Based on this,
Solution 1: If the client code is controlled by a trusted party.
Follow my solutions in my original answer.
This will make sure the message is delivered to the right person. But will not protect anything if the client code is purposely modified to receive all messages.
Solution 2: Assign private destination and user account to each client and configure security such that user account of a client can access only its destination.
Note: Found a link about "Restrictions for message selectors to provide message level authorization". But I think it is a vendor specific custom feature.
Hope this will be helpful.

Related

Can we replicate a HTTP SESSION idea in a MQTT architecture?

Roughly speaking a HTTP SESSION is a kind of secret that the server sends to the client (ex browser) after user's credentials is checked. This secret is passed trough all subsequents HTTP requests and will identify the user. This is important because HTTP are stateless - source.
Now I have a scenario where there is a communication between a machine and a MQTT broker inside the AWS-IoT core. The machine displays some screens. The first screen is the login and password.
The idea here is that after the first screen, IF the credentials are validated, the server should generate a "session" and we should send this "session" across the screen pages. The machine should send this "SESSION" in all subsequent messages and the server must to validate this string before any action. This is a request created by an electrical engineering team.
Me, in the software development side it seems that make no sense since all machines to be connected in the AWS IoT-Core broker (MQTT) must to use a certificate - with is the validation already.
Beside of that, the MQTT broker offers the SESSION persistence capabilities. I know that the SESSIONs (QoS 0/1) in the broker side are related to idea of confidence of delivery and reception of a message.
That being said is it possible to use session persistence in MQTT to behavior like a sessions in HTTP in order to identify users across screens in devices? If yes how?
No, HTTP Session concept is not in any way similar to the MQTT session. The only thing held in a MQTT clients session is the list of subscribed topics, a HTTP session can hold arbitrary data.
Also MQTT messages hold NO information about the user or even the client that published the message when it is delivered to the subscriber, the ONLY information present is the message payload and the topic it was published to.
While MQTTv5 adds the option to include more metadata, trying to add the concept of users sessions is like trying to make a square peg fit in round hole.
If you want to implement something as part of the message payload then that is entirely up to you, but it is nothing to do with the transport protocol.

Websocket from UI connecting to one of the instances for Spring boot application for streaming the data coming on a queue

I have an UI application (displays streaming) which makes a WebSocket connection to the Spring Boot microservice (multiple JVM'S) and this service forwards the request to one of the upstream servers and listens to the responses on a JMS queue coming from upstream server, which then response messages had to be returned to the socket.
Issue we are facing is since the socket is point to point, and the Spring Boot application is running on multiple instances which all are listening to the same JMS queue we are unable to serve the data back to the WebSocket when a message is received on a instance which the request to upstream wasn't made.
Here's the basic flow:
WebSocket -> instance1, instance2, instance3 -> Data provider
Instance1 made the request to data provider.
Data provider sends the data back to the queue
Instance 3 receives the message, but it doesn't have the socket connection to send the data back.
We had an interim solution using correlation id in JMS headers and selectors on the queue however now the data publisher is not able to provide the correlation id to depend on.
Does anybody have a better suggestion to address this?
Since you're using a request/reply pattern with JMS you must either use a correlation ID or a unique temporary queue for the response.
You indicated that, "the data publisher is not able to provide the correlation id to depend on." However, your application actually provides the correlation ID. The "data provider" in this case just needs to take it from the message it receives and put it into the response message. The process only requires 2 method calls by the "data provider" - javax.jms.Message.getJMSCorrelationID and javax.jms.Message.setJMSCorrelationID.
If the "data provider" can't do this then it's doubtful they will be able to accomplish the other option of using a unique temporary queue for the response. However, it's worth explaining in any case. When one of your "instance" servers sends the request message it first needs to use javax.jms.Session.createTemporaryQueue to create a temporary queue and then take the return parameter of that method and set it on the request message using javax.jms.Message.setJMSReplyTo. When the "data provider" receives the message they will get this value using javax.jms.Message.getJMSReplyTo and then send the response to this queue where the "instance" will then retrieve it.
These are the two generally accepted ways to implement a request/response pattern with JMS. I don't know of any other ways to implement such a pattern.

WebSocket client disconnect due to network loss doesn't get intercepted by Spring server

I have an application in which clients use websockets to connect to a server which is running Spring Boot Tomcat.
My question is if there is a way for the server to detect a client disconnect due to a network loss.
Thanks.
if you are using stomp , check SessionDisconnectEvent.
For raw Websocket connections, you can use :
WebSocketHandler-->afterConnectionClosed
I have searched before for this and the solution I was able to find was to implement a ping-pong mechanism between the server and the clients.
For example, each few seconds send a dummy message to the client on a specific topic and receive back another dummy reply, if you didn't get a reply for a configured period you can consider the client disconnected.
As mentioned here,
STOMP and Spring also allow us to set up topics, where every
subscriber will receive the same message. This is going to be very
useful for tracking active users. In the UI, each user subscribes to a
topic that reports back which users are active, and in our example
that topic will produce a message every 2 seconds. The client will
reply to every message containing a list of users with its own
heartbeat, which then updates the message being sent to other clients.
If a client hasn't checked in for more than 5 seconds (i.e. missed two
heartbeats), we consider them offline. This gives us near real time
resolution of users being available to chat. Users will appear in a
box on the left hand side of the screen, clicking on a name will pull
up a chat window for them, and names with an envelope next to them
have new messages.

duplicated JabberId resource on multiple devices

XMPP sends messages only to highest priority resources of a given JID. See 1, 2 and 3
I want to create a client that will check all my current resources (home, work, mobile)
the client will be able to announce itself with one of those existing resources
the hope is that the client will be able to receive messages into multiple devices. This should work.... unless for some reason the service doesn't accept multiple clients with the same resource? is that something specified in the protocol? or something that implementations might choose to allow/forbid?
The full JID is a unique identifier, so you cannot be logged in twice with the same one.
If you want more than one client to receive messages, then this can be accomplished by having both of them (different resources) with the same priority and using a server which supports this type of routing. This is an option under the spec.
XMPP sends messages only to highest priority resources of a given JID.
This depeds on your server configuration or server software. There is also server software wich routes messages to bare jids to all resources.
You get all connected resources f your contacts with the presence. So you could also manual send the message to each resource directly.

How would I create an asynchronous notification system using RESTful web services?

I have a Java application which I make available via RESTful web services. I want to create a mechanism so clients can register for notifications of events. The rub is that there is no guarantee that the client programs will be Java programs and hence I won't be able to use JMS for this (i.e. if every client was a Java app then we could allow the clients to subscribe to a JMS topic and listen there for notification messages).
The use case is roughly as follows:
A client registers itself with my server application, via a RESTful web service call, indicating that it is interested in getting a notification message anytime a specific object is updated.
When the object of interest is updated then my server application needs to put out a notification to all clients who are interested in being notified of this event.
As I mentioned above I know how I would do this if all clients were Java apps -- set up a topic that clients can listen to for notification messages. However I can't use that approach since it's likely that many clients will not be able to listen to a JMS topic for notification messages.
Can anyone here enlighten me as to how this problem is typically solved? What mechanism can I provide using a RESTful API?
I can think of four approaches:
A Twitter approach: You register the Client and then it calls back periodically with a GET to retrieve any notifications.
The Client describes how it wants to receive the notification when it makes the registration request. That way you could allow JMS for those that can handle it and fall back to email or similar for those that can't.
Take a URL during the registration request and POST back to each Client individually when you have a notification. Hardly Pub/Sub but the effect would be similar. Of course you'd be assuming that the Client was listening for these notifications and had implemented their Client according to your specs.
Buy IBM WebSphere MQ (MQSeries). Best IBM product ever. Not REST but it's great at multi-platform integration like this.
We have this problem and need low-latency asynchronous updates to relatively few listeners. Our two alternative solutions have been:
Polling: Hammer the list of resources you need with GET requests
Streaming event updates: Provide a monitor resource. The server keeps the connection open. As events occur, the server transmits a stream of event descriptions using multipart content-type or chunked transfer-encoding.
In the response to the RESTful request, you could supply an individualized RESTful URL that the client can monitor for updates.
That is, you have one URL (/Signup.htm, say), that accepts the client's information (id if appropriate, id of object to monitor) and returns a customized url (/Monitor/XYZPDQ), where XYZPDQ is a UUID created for that particular client. The client can poll that customized URL at some interval, and it will receive a notification if the update occurs.
If you don't care about who the client is (and don't want to create so many UUIDs) you could just have separate RESTful URLs for each object that might want to be monitored, and the "signup" URL would just return the correct one.
As John Saunders says, you can't really do a more straightforward publish/subscribe via HTTP.
If polling is not acceptable I would consider using web-sockets (e.g. see here). Though to be honest I like the idea suggested by user189423 of multipart content-type or chunked transfer-encoding as well.

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