Being paranoid, I'm working on locking down access to a SOAP server. So far, I've got:

• HTTPS only
• Basic Authentication
• IP restrictions

So basically, only requests from the correct IP addresses with the correct authentication over HTTPS get through. But I'm wondering if that's enough :)

The system needs to be flexible enough that it can easily be expanded, but security is definitely a priority over flexibility.

The other method I thought of (dropping the Basic Authentication) was:

• keep list of valid MAC addresses in DB on server
• on initial request, send challenge string
• client appends to MAC address and creates MD5 hash
• server confirms this by looking up expected MAC address for that IP and sets a session cookie with client (another MD5 hash, restricted to particular IP in DB table server side, confirmed with each request and with 15 minute session timeout)

Or am I approaching this the wrong way? Searching on this I haven't found any advice over use HTTPS and basic auth...

cLive ;-)

Update: to avoid confusion here, all clients are servers we have control over. I'm leaning towards creating a local Certification Authority and SSL certificate authentication - This article looks promising. Thanks for thoughts so far :)

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