Ensure exclusive access to webservice

Just to be on the safe side, what's the best practice to ensure that only my application has access to my webservice, which is hosted on a public server? Should I implement I shared key or something? 开发者_JAVA技巧

My webservice is hosted on Googles App Engine and my Application runs on iPhones and iPads.

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Thanks, Henrik

some sort of challenge/response authentication would be your best bet, but you could use something as simple as a key that's sent with every request. it might be quite easy for someone with a packet sniffer to reverse engineer that security though - i guess the amount of time you spend on it will relate to how much you really care :)

If you require your iphone app users to enter a loginid/password, then it is trivial to achieve what you want. But I assume you don't want that ..

Without that, there is no way to ensure you app has exclusive access to your web-services. People can always sniff HTTP traffic and spoof it. People can decompile/reverse-engineer your app to figure out the key/password.

See other discussions on StackOverflow - How to restrict access to my web service? and How can I create and use a web service in public but still restrict its use to only my app?

You could program your app to only serve requests that include your iPhone's unique identier - see StackOverflow question [Unique identifier for an iPhone app]. The id could still be sniffed, so depending on your needs, you may need methods to counter that.

Well, i had similar problem. What i realized, there is no 100% solution. What i did is, i used different approach. I have implemented OAuth and SSL, of course and than make algorithm for my web service to learn behavior of my app. I try to put that algorithm in some kind of pattern, template, so it can be used in more scenarios. It's still in developing, so here is code of simple console app that will simulate that algorithm. Hope this can help: https://github.com/vjeftovic/LearningRESTSimulation