[omniORB] How to prevent service overrides of the Naming service?

[Duncan Grisby]

On Wed, 2025-05-28 at 14:24 +0200, Daniel Krügler via omniORB-list
wrote:

[...]
> Is it somehow possible to prevent overriding already registered
> services in the NamingService or are there any other techniques to
> prevent this situation?

The Naming service is an extremely simple thing — it is literally just
a mapping from names to object references, with no control over the
object lifetimes or, as you say, any sort of access control over who
can override a name mapping with a different object.

There are several things you could do to make your system more secure

 - If your login service runs on a well-known host and port, you could
use a corbaloc URI for it, and not look it up at all.

 - You could make your own trivial name -> object lookup service that
does something to authenticate callers that register new entries.

 - You should use TLS for all communication, with mutual
authentication, and make sure all parts of your system have one or more
trusted CAs that sign all the certificates.

You could of course extend omniNames to add some of these things. If
you modified it to use TLS (which would be a very simple change), it
would only accept connections from clients with a certificate signed by
its trusted CA, which would avoid most of your concerns.

I hope that helps!

Duncan.

-- 
Duncan Grisby <duncan at grisby.org>