WS security with UsernameToken

I recently needed to troubleshoot a client connection to a Web service that required WS security using the UsernameToken profile with a digest password (not plain text). The easiest way to do this (I thought) would be to just write the UsernameToken headers myself. That way, I would be minimizing the number of frameworks involved and so could get to the heart of the problem easier.

After a decent amount of searching, I couldn't find a complete Java example, but was able to piece together a workable solution. I'm no security expert, just an application developer trying to troubleshoot a problem. So this definitely isn't production-ready code, but if you're in the same boat trying to troubleshoot a connection, hopefully this will be of some use to you and save you some time.

The code here is a SOAPHandler that will add the appropriate headers to your Web service call. I won't go into how to configure a handler here as that is specific to whatever development tool you are using. But once you get this handler configured correctly, it should add the headers so your SOAP message looks something like this:

The main difficulty with the implementation is the password digest. From the spec:

Password_Digest = Base64 ( SHA-1 ( nonce + created + password ) )

In other words, you must concatenate the bytes or a nonce, a created date, and the password; then SHA-1 digest the result; then Base64 encode the digest. Here is the code: