Message layer authentication

 

Defines the credential information and sends that information across the network so that a receiving server can interpret it.

When you send authentication information across the network using a token (whether the token is a user ID and password token, that is, Generic Security Services Username Password (GSSUP), or a mechanism-specific format token, Lightweight Third Party Authentication (LTPA), for example), the transmission is considered message layer authentication because the data is sent along with the message inside a service context.

A pure Java client uses basic authentication (GSSUP) as the authentication mechanism to establish client identity. However, a servlet can use either basic authentication (GSSUP) or the authentication mechanism of the server (LTPA) to send security information in the message layer. Use LTPA by authenticating or mapping the basic authentication credentials to the security mechanism of the server.

The security token contained in a token-based credential is authentication mechanism-specific. That is, the way the token is interpreted is only known by the authentication mechanism. Therefore, each authentication mechanism has an object ID (OID) representing it. The OID and the client token are sent to the server, so that the server knows which mechanism to use when reading and validating the token. The following list contains the OIDs for each mechanism:

GSSUP: oid:2.23.130.1.1.1
LTPA: oid:1.3.18.0.2.30.2
SWAM: No OID because it is not forwardable

On the server, the authentication mechanisms can interpret the token and create a credential, or they can authenticate basic authentication data from the client, and create a credential. Either way, the created credential is the received credential that the authorization check uses to determine if the user has access to invoke the method. You can specify the authentication mechanism by using the com.ibm.CORBA.authenticationTarget property on the client side. (Basic authentication is currently the only valid value.) You can configure the server through the administrative console.

While this property tells you which authentication mechanism to use, you also need to specify whether you want to perform authentication over the message layer (that is, get a BasicAuth or token-based credential). To complete this task, specify the com.ibm.CSI.performClientAuthenticationRequired(True or False) and com.ibm.CSI.performClientAuthenticationSupported (True or False) properties. Indicating that client authentication is required implies that it must be done for every request. Indicating that the authentication mechanism is supported implies that it might be done but is not required. For some servers, this option is appropriate if no resources are protected. In most cases it is a best practice to indicate that this mechanism is supported so that client authentication is performed if both the client and server support it. Client authentication it is not performed when communicating with certain servers that do not want security, yet the method requests still succeed.

 

Configuring authentication retries

Situations occur where you want a prompt to reappear if you entered your user ID and password incorrectly or you want a method to retry when a particular error occurs back at the client. If you can correct the error by information at the client side, the system automatically performs a retry without the client seeing the failure, if the system is configured appropriately.

Some of these errors include...

By default, authentication retries are enabled and perform three retries before returning the error to the client. The property used to enable or disable authentication retries is com.ibm.CORBA.authenticationRetryEnabled (True or False). The property used to specify the number of retry attempts is com.ibm.CORBA.authenticationRetryCount.