Network Deployment (Distributed operating systems), v8.0 > Tune performance > Tune security > Tune, hardening, and maintaining security configurations
Hardening security configurations
There are several methods that you can use to protect the WAS infrastructure and applications from different forms of attack. Several different techniques can help with multiple forms of attack. Sometimes a single attack can leverage multiple forms of intrusion to achieve the end goal. For example, in the simplest case, network sniffing can be used to obtain passwords and those passwords can then be used to mount an application-level attack. The following issues are discussed in IBM WebSphere Developer Technical Journal: WAS V5 advanced security and system hardening:
Procedure
- Take preventative measures to protect the infrastructure.
- Make applications less vulnerable to attack.
- At a minimum, ensure administrative security is enabled in all WebSphere processes. This protects access to the administrative ConfigService interface and managed beans (MBeans) that enables control over the WebSphere process if it is compromised.
- Ensure SSL is used whenever possible, and mutual SSL whenever possible. However, mutual SSL requires all clients to supply a trusted personal certificate in order to connect.
- Remove any unnecessary certificate authority (CA) signer certificates from your trust stores.
- Change default keystore passwords during or after profile creation using the AdminTask changeMultipleKeyStorePasswords command.
- Change your Lightweight Third-Party Authentication (LTPA) keys periodically. We can configure the automatic regeneration of LTPA keys if necessary.
- Common Secure Interoperability version 2 (CSIv2) inbound Basic authentication is supported in this release of WAS. The authentication default is 'required'.
What to do next
In this release of WAS, more security hardening features of the server are enabled by default. However, if the features are not enabled after migration you can enable them yourself. See the Security hardening features enablement and migration article for more information.
For additional information about hardening security configurations, see the WAS security web page.
Enablement and migration considerations of Security hardening features
Tune, hardening, and maintaining security configurations