The J2EE role-based authorization concept is extended to protect the WebSphere Application Server administrative subsystem.
A number of administrative roles are defined to provide degrees of authority that are needed to perform certain administrative functions from either the Web-based administrative console or the system management scripting interface. The authorization policy is only enforced when administrative security is enabled. The following table describes the administrative roles:
| Role | Description |
| Monitor | An individual or group that uses the monitor role has
the least amount of privileges. A monitor can complete the following tasks:
|
| Configurator | An individual or group that uses the configurator role
has the monitor privilege plus the ability to change the WebSphere Application
Server configuration. The configurator can perform all the day-to-day configuration
tasks. For example, a configurator can complete the following tasks:
|
| Operator | An individual or group that uses the operator role has
monitor privileges plus ability to change the runtime state. For example,
an operator can complete the following tasks:
|
| Administrator | An individual or group that uses the administrator role
has the operator and configurator privileges plus additional privileges that
are granted solely to the administrator role. For example, an administrator
can complete the following tasks:
Note: An administrator cannot map users and groups to the administrator roles. |
| iscadmins | This role is only available for administrative console
users, not for wsadmin users. Users who are granted this role have administrator
privileges for managing users and groups in the federated repositories. For
example, a user of the iscadmins role can complete the following tasks:
|
| Deployer | Users granted this role can perform both configuration actions and runtime operations on applications. See the Deployer role section for more details. |
| Adminsecuritymanager | Fine-grained administrative security is available using wsadmin only. However, you can assign users and groups to the adminsecuritymanager role on the cell level through wsadmin scripts and the administrative console. Using the adminsecuritymanager role, you can assign users and groups to the administrative user roles and administrative group roles. However, an administrator cannot assign users and groups to the administrative user roles and administrative group roles including the adminsecuritymanager role. See the Adminsecuritymanager role section for more details. |
The server ID that is specified and the administrative ID, if specified, when enabling administrative security is automatically mapped to the administrator role.
Users and groups can be added or removed from the administrative roles from the WebSphere Application Server administrative console at any time. The Primary administrative user name must be used to log on to the administrative console to change the administrative user and group roles. A best practice is to map a group or groups, rather than specific users, to administrative roles because it is more flexible and easier to administer.
In addition to mapping user or groups, a special-subject can also be mapped to the administrative roles. A special-subject subject is a generalization of a particular class of users. The AllAuthenticated special subject means that the access check of the administrative role ensures that the user making the request is at least authenticated. The Everyone special subject means that anyone, authenticated or not, can perform the action, as if security was not enabled.
A user that is granted a deployer role can perform all of the configuration and runtime operations on an application. A deployer role can be subsets of both configurator and operator roles. However, a user granted a deployer role cannot configure or operate any other resources (server, node).
When fine-grained administrative security is used, only a user granted a deployer role to an application can configure and operate that application.
Cell level configurators can configure applications (install, edit, deploy, and uninstall). Cell level operators can also operate (start and stop) applications. However, a user granted a deployer role at cell level can also perform configuration and operation on all applications. The following table lists the capabilities of the deployer role when fine-grained administrative security is used:
| Operation | Required Roles ( Any one) |
|---|---|
| Install application | Cell-configurator, target-deployer |
| Uninstall application | Cell-configurator, application-deployer |
| List application | Cell-monitor, application-monitor |
| Edit, update and redeploy application | Cell-configurator, application-deployer |
| Export application | Cell-monitor, application-monitor |
| Start-stop application | Cell-operator, application-deployer |
Where:
The target-deployer can not explicitly start or stop a new application. However, when a target-deployer starts a server on a target, all of the applications that have their auto-start attribute set to yes are started when the server starts.
It is recommended that the application-deployer set this attribute to true if the application-deployer does not want the application to be started by the target-deployer.
The adminsecuritymanager role separates administrative security administration from other application administration.
By default, serverId and adminID, if specified, are assigned to this role in the cell level authorization table. This role implies a monitor role. However, an administrator role does not imply the adminsecuritymanager role. When fine-grained admin security is used, only a user granted this role at cell level can manage administrative authorization groups. However, a user granted this role for each administrative authorization group can map users to administrative roles for those groups. The following lists the capabilities of the adminsecuritymanager role at different levels (cell and administrative authorization group):
| Action | Who can perform |
|---|---|
| Map users to administrative roles for cell level | Only the adminsecuritymanager of the cell |
| Map users to administrative roles for an authorization group | Only the adminsecuritymanager of that authorization group or the adminsecuritymanager of the cell |
| Manage authorization groups (create, delete, add resource to an authorization group, or remove resource from an authorization group or list) | Only the adminsecuritymanager of the cell |