Asynchronous messaging - security considerations: WAS ND

Asynchronous messaging - security considerations

This topic describes considerations that be aware of if you want to use security for asynchronous messaging with WebSphere Application Server.

Security for messaging operates as a part of the WebSphere Application Server global security, and is enabled only when global security is enabled.

When global security is enabled, JMS connections made to the JMS provider are authenticated, and access to JMS resources owned by the JMS provider are controlled by access authorizations. Also, all requests to create new connections to the JMS provider must provide a user ID and password for authentication. The user ID and password do not need to be provided by the application. If authentication is successful, then the JMS connection is created; if the authentication fails then the connection request is ended.

Standard J2C authentication is used for a request to create a new connection to the JMS provider. You can specify a Component-managed Authentication Alias and a Container-managed Authentication Alias for each JMS connection factory. The use of the associated J2C authentication data entries depends on the resource authentication (res-auth) setting, as follows:

If your resource authentication (res-auth) is set to Application, set the alias in the Component-managed Authentication Alias. If the application that tries to create a connection to the JMS provider specifies a user ID and password, those values are used to authenticate the creation request. If the application does not specify a user ID and password, the values defined by the Component-managed Authentication Alias are used. If the connection factory is not configured with a Component-managed Authentication Alias, then you receive a runtime JMS exception when an attempt is made to connect to the JMS provider.

If your res-auth is set to Container, set the Container-managed Authentication Alias. The values defined by the Container-managed Authentication Alias are used to authenticate the creation request. If you do not specify an alias, then you receive a runtime JMS exception when an attempt is made to connect to the JMS provider.

Note:

User IDs longer than 12 characters cannot be used for authentication with the embedded WebSphere JMS provider. For example, the default Windows NT user ID, Administrator, is not valid for use with embedded WebSphere messaging, because it contains 13 characters. Therefore, an authentication alias for a WebSphere JMS provider connection factory must specify a user ID no longer than 12 characters.

If you want to use a WebSphere MQ JMS Provider JMS connection when using Bindings transport mode, you set the property Transport type=BINDINGS on the WebSphere MQ Queue Connection Factory. You must also choose one of the following options:

To use security credentials, ensure that the user specified is the currently logged on user for the WebSphere Application Server process. If the user specified is not the current logged on user for the WebSphere Application Server process, then the WebSphere MQ JMS Bindings authentication throws the error MQJMS2013 invalid security authentication supplied for MQQueueManager error.

Do not specify security credentials. On the WebSphere MQ Connection Factory, ensure that both the Component-managed Authentication Alias and the Container-managed Authentication Alias properties are not set.

Authorization to access JMS resources owned by the embedded WebSphere JMS provider is controlled by authorization data in the config\integral-jms-authorisations.xml file. For information about editing this file, see Configuring authorization security for the embedded WebSphere JMS provider.

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