Secure administration, applications, and infrastructure settings

Security has some performance impacts on your applications. The performance impacts can vary depending upon the application workload characteristics. You manage the effect of security on you workload by configuring administrative, application, and infrastructure security on a global level.

To view this administrative console page, click Security > Secure administration, applications, and infrastructure.

Security has some performance impacts on your applications. The performance impacts can vary depending upon the application workload characteristics. You must first determine that the needed level of security is enabled for your applications, and then measure the impact of security on the performance of your applications.

When security is configured, validate any changes to the user registry or authentication mechanism panels. Click Apply to validate the user registry settings. An attempt is made to authenticate the server ID or to validate the admin ID (if internalServerID is used) to the configured user registry. Validating the user registry settings after enabling administrative security can avoid problems when you restart the server for the first time.

Configuration tab

Security configuration wizard

Launches a wizard that enables you to configure the basic administrative and application security settings. This process restricts administrative tasks and applications to authorized users.

Using this wizard, you can configure application security, resource or Java 2 Connector (J2C) security, and a user registry. You can configure an existing registry and enable administrative, application, and resource security.

When you apply changes made by using the security configuration wizard, administrative security is turned on by default.

Security configuration report

Launches a security configuration report that displays the core security settings of the application server. The report also displays the administrative users and groups and the CORBA naming roles.

A current limitation to the report is that it does not display application level security information. The report also does not display information on Java Message Service (JMS) security, bus security, or Web Services security.

Enable administrative security

Specifies whether to enable administrative security for this application server domain. Administrative security requires users to authenticate before obtaining administrative control of the application server.

For more information, see the related link for administrative roles.

When enabling security, set the authentication mechanism configuration and specify a valid user ID and password (or a valid admin ID when internalServerID feature is used) in the selected registry configuration.

Note: There is a difference between the user ID (which is normally called the admin ID), which identifies administrators who manage the environment, and a server ID, which is used for server-to-server communication. You do not need to enter a server ID and password when you are using the internal server ID feature. However, optionally, you can specify a server ID and password. To specify the server ID and password, complete the following steps:

1. Click Security > Secure administration, applications, and infrastructure.

2. Under User accounts repository, select the repository and click Configure.

3. Specify the server ID and password in the Server user identity section.

If your server does not restart after you enable administrative security, you can disable security. Go to your app_server_root/bin directory and run the wsadmin -conntype NONE command. At the wsadmin> prompt, enter securityoff and then type exit to return to a command prompt. Restart the server with security disabled to check any incorrect settings through the administrative console.

Default:

Enabled

Enable application security

Enables security for the applications in your environment. This type of security provides application isolation and requirements for authenticating application users

In previous releases of WebSphere Application Server, when a user enabled global security, both administrative and application security were enabled. In WebSphere Application Server V6.1, the previous notion of global security is split into administrative security and application security, each of which you can enable separately.

As a result of this split, WebSphere Application Server clients must know whether application security is disabled at the target server. Administrative security is enabled, by default. Application security is disabled, by default. To enable application security, enable administrative security. Application security is in effect only when administrative security is enabled.

Default:

Disabled

Use Java 2 security to restrict application access to local resources

Specifies whether to enable or disable Java 2 security permission checking. By default, access to local resources is not restricted. You can choose to disable Java 2 security, even when application security is enabled.

When the Use Java 2 security to restrict application access to local resources option is enabled and if an application requires more Java 2 security permissions than are granted in the default policy, the application might fail to run properly until the required permissions are granted in either the app.policy file or the was.policy file of the application. AccessControl exceptions are generated by applications that do not have all the required permissions. See the related links for more information about Java 2 security.

Default:

Disabled

Warn if applications are granted custom permissions

Specifies that during application deployment and application start, the security runtime issues a warning if applications are granted any custom permissions. Custom permissions are permissions that are defined by the user applications, not Java API permissions. Java API permissions are permissions in the java.* and javax.* packages.

The application server provides support for policy file management. A number of policy files are available in this product, some of them are static and some of them are dynamic. Dynamic policy is a template of permissions for a particular type of resource. No code base is defined and no relative code base is used in the dynamic policy template. The real code base is dynamically created from the configuration and run-time data. The filter.policy file contains a list of permissions that you do not want an application to have according to the J2EE 1.4 specification. For more information on permissions, see the related link about Java 2 security policy files.

You cannot enable this option without enabling the Use Java 2 security to restrict application access to local resources option.

Default:

Disabled

Restrict access to resource authentication data

Enable this option to restrict application access to sensitive Java Connector Architecture (JCA) mapping authentication data. Consider enabling this option when both of the following conditions are true:

• Java 2 security is enforced.

• The application code is granted the accessRuntimeClasses WebSphereRuntimePermission permission in the was.policy file found within the application enterprise archive (EAR) file. For example, the application code is granted the permission when the following line is found in your was.policy file:

  permission com.ibm.websphere.security.WebSphereRuntimePermission "accessRuntimeClasses";

The Restrict access to resource authentication data option adds fine-grained Java 2 security permission checking to the default principal mapping of the WSPrincipalMappingLoginModule implementation. You must grant explicit permission to J2EE applications that use the WSPrincipalMappingLoginModule implementation directly in the Java Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS) login when Use Java 2 security to restrict application access to local resources and the Restrict access to resource authentication data options are enabled.

Default:

Disabled

Current realm definition

Specifies the current setting for the active user repository.

This field is read-only.

Available realm definitions

Specifies the available user account repositories.

Use domain-qualified user names

Specifies that user names that are returned by methods are qualified with the security domain in which they reside.

Default:

Disabled

Active protocol

Specifies the active authentication protocol for Remote Method Invocation over the Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (RMI IIOP) requests, when security is enabled.

An Object Management Group (OMG) protocol called Common Secure Interoperability V2 (CSIv2) supports increased vendor interoperability and additional features. If all of the servers in your security domain are V5.x and later servers, specify CSI as your protocol.

If some servers are V3.x or V4.x servers, specify CSI and SAS.

SAS is supported only between V6.0.x and previous version servers that have been federated in a V6.1 cell.

Note: This field displays only when a V6.0.x and earlier server is detected in your environment.

Default:	BOTH
Range:	CSI and SAS, CSI

Related concepts

Related tasks

Related Reference

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