my recent reads..

Sep 4, 2007 Read

The World is Flat


I'd heard about Thomas L. Friedman's The World is Flat long before I got to read it of course. Living in Singapore, a nexus of the flattening world, makes for a daily self-evident truth.

Finally sitting down to read it, I was totally engaged way beyond my expectations. Friedman's views are well though out and strongly held. It's an impressive analysis, but not dry as a result. By taking us on somewhat of a travelogue with interesting characters and stories along the way, it is a neat voyage of discovery and illumination (although I must I admit to skipping some of the discussion of US domestic issues).

A warning though. This can be a frightening read. Helping you see further down the road does not necessarily mean you are comfortable with the destination! It depends from whence you come, and how prepared you (and your children) are for the journey.

There is one thought that increasingly niggles however.

It strikes me that there is an inherent contradiction between the conventional response of developed nations to the forces flattening the world. We seek to move from sunset to sunrise industries, transform our citizens into high-value knowledge workers. But how sustainable is that? In a flattening world, increasingly it's like trying to hold back the ocean as historic educational and environmental/economic advantages are washed away.

At least, this would be a contradiction if we do not lean on a "hidden assumption" that I think Friedman doesn't directly address: the regulation of people and labour that sovereign states and our tribal nature still demand as our right.

To me, this seems to be the last frontier of globalisation:
  • The freedom of financial markets. Capital can move around the globe in milliseconds. Nations may tax and regulate, but fiscal policy generally does not "control". Check
  • The freedom of goods and services. Check
  • Freedom of labour. Work in progress
In other words: while we may invest and trade together, I will control whether you can live or work with me.

This is border protection in action. The structural mechanism that maintains the "impedence" between nations. It is what helps to maintain differential standards of living, wages and opportunities. Sovereignty.

Logically one would think that this is a barrier that must eventually come down as the flattening process proceeds inexorably. Utopia! ... if it wasn't for human nature. One wonders whether there is any possible future in which this could be played out peacefully. Or will politics, tribalism, and xenophobia overcome our more lofty tendencies?

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Sep 3, 2007 Laugh

Line Rider - jump the shark

I've had fun playing around with line rider before ... but this is something else!

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Sep 2, 2007 Java OracleAS Security

Adding reCAPTCHA to Oracle SSO

I've blogged previously about playing with the reCAPTCHA service in Perl. Seriously cool! Not because it's foolproof - it isn't - but the side-effect of helping to digitize old documents and books is a truely great idea.

I'm starting to see reCAPTCHA more often now. Bex Huff put it in his comment form, and blogged about it (though I can't find his posting anymore. Update: link from Bex, thanks!). But I haven't seen it used with Oracle SSO yet ... sounds like an interesting weekend project!

So I had a poke around, and like to share the solution. Although I am going to integrate the recaptcha service, you could use the same approach to add any 2nd or 3rd factor to the SSO authentication process. End result is the reCAPTCHA appearing and working in the Oracle SSO login page. The sample here is based on the Oracle Collaboration Suite 10g branding:


The sources for my example are available as OssoRecaptcha-1.0-src.zip. See readme.txt in the zip for more detailed instructions and discussion.

There are basically two things we need to take care of to integrate reCAPTCHA. First, customise the login page to render the captcha challenge. Secondly, we need to insert a custom authenticator to handle the captcha validation before the standard authentication.

I've used the ReCaptcha Java Library released by Tanesha Networks to simplify things.

Customising the Login Page

This is the simplest part, and pretty well documented in "Creating deployment-specific pages".

The following code renders the captcha challenge and just needs to be included in the login page at an appropriate point.

<%
// create recaptcha
ReCaptcha captcha = ReCaptchaFactory.newReCaptcha(RecaptchaConf.RECAPTCHA_PUBLIC_KEY, RecaptchaConf.RECAPTCHA_PRIVATE_KEY, false);
String captchaScript = captcha.createRecaptchaHtml(request.getParameter("error"), null);
out.print(captchaScript);
%>
RecaptchaConf is a class included in the sample to hold your site-specific reCAPTCHA keys that you can easily get by registering at http://recaptcha.org.

Customising SSO Authentication

We have a simple task: intercept and evaluate the catpcha response before allowing standard SSO authentiation to proceed. Simple, yet not exactly documented unfortunately. The documentation for "Integrating with Third-Party Access Management Systems" is almost what we need to do, but not quite.

The approach I have taken is to sub-class the standard authenticator (oracle.security.sso.server.auth.SSOServerAuth) rather than just implement an IPASAuthInterface plug-in.

The only method of significance is "authenticate", where if the captcha response is present, we evaluate it prior to handing off to the standard authentication.
public IPASUserInfo authenticate(HttpServletRequest request)
throws IPASAuthException, IPASInsufficientCredException
{

SSODebug.print(SSODebug.INFO, "Processing OssoRecaptchaAuthenticator.authenticate for " + request.getRemoteAddr());
if (request.getParameter("recaptcha_challenge_field") == null) {
throw new IPASInsufficientCredException("");
} else {
// create recaptcha and test response before calling auth chain
ReCaptcha captcha = ReCaptchaFactory.newReCaptcha(RecaptchaConf.RECAPTCHA_PUBLIC_KEY, RecaptchaConf.RECAPTCHA_PRIVATE_KEY, false);
ReCaptchaResponse captcharesp = captcha.checkAnswer(request.getRemoteAddr(),
request.getParameter("recaptcha_challenge_field"),
request.getParameter("recaptcha_response_field"));
SSODebug.print(SSODebug.INFO, "ReCaptcha response errors = " + captcharesp.getErrorMessage());
if (!captcharesp.isValid()) {
throw new IPASAuthException(captcharesp.getErrorMessage());
}

return super.authenticate(request);
}
}
A couple of things to note:

  • This method is first called prior to the login challenge to see if you are already authenticated, hence the check for a captcha response before boldly going ahead to authenticate
  • The specific exception messages raised in this class seem to get "lost" by the time the handler returns to the login page (at which point you always seem to have a generic failure message). In other words, users will basically just get told to try again. I haven't found a way around this yet.
  • See the example usage of SSODebug to log messages which will appear in the SSO log (as configured in ORACLE_HOME/sso/conf/policy.properties)
  • We'll deploy the custom class into the OC4J_SECURITY container, rather than to $ORACLE_HOME/sso/plugins since it seems plugins get a limited environment that does not include all of the required support classes. Deploying to OC4J_SECURITY avoids this problem.

Deployment

The most robust approach to deployment is to explode, modify and the rebuild the OC4J_SECURITY EAR file ($ORACLE_HOME/sso/lib/ossosvr.ear) once you are confident everything is working fine. I haven't covered how you do that here however.

Rather, I'm deploying the sample directly into an existing OC4J_SECURITY container. Note that with this approach, if you ever redeploy the OC4J_SECURITY application (which can happen during an upgrade or patch for example), then your changes
would be destroyed.

There's an Ant build script included in the sample that takes care of the details, but is pretty straightforward...

Firstly, two copy operations:
  1. Copy the login page to $ORACLE_HOME/j2ee/OC4J_SECURITY/applications/sso/web/
  2. Copy the supporting jar files to $ORACLE_HOME/j2ee/OC4J_SECURITY/applications/sso/web/WEB-INF/lib/
Second, the authenticator configuration is governed by $ORACLE_HOME/sso/conf/policy.properties.
MediumSecurity_AuthPlugin = oracle.security.sso.server.auth.SSOServerAuth
# replaced with:
MediumSecurity_AuthPlugin = com.urion.captcha.OssoRecaptchaAuthenticator
Finally, we are ready to restart the OC4J_SECURITY container
opmnctl restartproc process-type=OC4J_SECURITY
and test out the customised login. Try...
http://you.site:port/oiddas
Give it a go! Love to hear from anyone who deploys reCAPTCHA on a production Oracle Portal or Applications site for example.

Postscript: Patrick Wolf obviously had a weekend free also, and has now posted a solution for adding reCATPCHA to APEX ;-) Cool!

Postscript 2008-06-03: I finally got around to setting this up with its own sourceforge project.
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Sep 1, 2007 Laugh Read Listen

A Different Point of View


The Jedi are terrorists, and the Star Wars saga just pulp propaganda undermining the Empire's sworn duty to protect peace and prosperity through the galaxy. Regular citizens just want to get on with life, but will the rebels let them? Hell no!

That is a different point of view;-)

This podcast series, presented from the point of view of standtrooper TD-0013, is a classic. If you've seen the Star Wars movies, prepare to be shocked into realising that Lucas just got totally sucked in by flimsy lies of the Rebel Alliance.

I found this at podiobooks [now scribl] where you can subscribe to the series RSS feed for your iPod or whatever, or checkout the author's site (now archived). Highly recommended if you grew up with Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia.

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