DDSSEC13 — Security for DDS-RPC

DDS security does not provide any additional means to secure the DDS-RPC service calls. Absent this the protection would be based on the underlying DDS Topics.

DDS-RPC maps all operations of an interface to two unkeyed Topics. One for the request and one for the reply. The request Topic is used for all operations and likewise the reply Topic.

Thus relying on the underlying Topics would provide access control granularity at the level of the service and not allow to give narrower permissions. E.g. invoke certain operations and not others. This is not acceptable in some deployment situations.

One solution may be to make the Topics keyed by the operation. This is possible now that IDL42 allows the discriminator of a union to act as the key.

Alternatively DDS-Security could specify some other mechanism, for example designate a data-tag to indicate the operations that the request DataWriter may invoke. The receiver side would check that the operation invoked matches the DataWriter tag before processing the request.