There is no service to delete or manipulate resultsets, so you do not
need a session-id to protect it.
In response to Matthew: it is not explicitly part of the SRU/SRW
protocol that referencing a resultset can generate a new resultset
with a new name.It would force clients to refresh the resutset after
each access. I do not see a reason to do so; when there is a
resultset why make a new one that is the same? I can imagine that
the server uses each access to a resultset to increase the TTL.
With respect to session-id - All the session context that is needed
are the SRW/SRU request parameters. Only in case the SRW-
client is a gateway between browsers and the SRW-server it needs
to know to which browser-client the response should be sent.
Therefor it needs the ability to send extra parameters to the server
that the server should echo. Rather than reserving it for a session-id
only it would be better when the server returns al the unknown
request parameters and leave it up to the client what to do with it. In
that way the gateway doesn't have to remember any context
anymore.
Theo
On 13 Jun 02, at 23:20, Robert Sanderson wrote:
> > > Yes. Otherwise you could subvert other users' result sets as
> > > you don't know who created it.
>
> > Not so. In SRW (unlike Z39.50) the result set name is really a
> > result set identifier generated by the server rather than requested
> > by the client. So in SRW the result set name effectively acts as a
> > session id.
>
> Yes. But if they persist, which they must in some form, then they can
> be operated on.
>
> For example, I send to client A a result set named 'rs1'. The rogue
> DDOS client then sends me a request against a result set named 'rs1'
> which promptly disappears for the real user.
>
> In the time between the server sending the resultset name to the
> client, a different attacking client can send a request which uses
> that name. You simply can't avoid that. You need to have a way of
> determining if the client is allowed to operate on that result set.
>
>
> > This result set name only has limited life. One receipt of a second
> > SRW request to get the next 10 records, the server is perfectly at
> > liberty to respond with a new result set name (at an abstraction
> > level this name would be referencing the same result set) i.e. this
> > is just a mechanism to maintain state between SRW requests.
>
> I could send continuous (SOAP is HTTP/1.1 so includes pipelining and
> gzipping, making this even more effective) requests to trash random
> resultset names.
>
> Regardless of how quickly they disappear, or how obscurely they're
> named, without an identifier which uniquely identifies the connection
> to which the result set belongs, they can be subverted.
>
> Like Microsoft's "Security through Obscurity", this is no security at
> all.
>
> Rob
>
>
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