Administrative security

Administrative security determines whether security is used at all, the type of registry against which authentication takes place, and other values, many of which act as defaults. Proper planning is required because incorrectly enabling administrative security can lock you out of the administrative console or cause the server to end abnormally.

It is strongly recommended that you allow the default installation to install administrative security as on by default.

Administrative security can be thought of as a "big switch" that activates a wide variety of security settings for WebSphere Application Server. Values for these settings can be specified, but they will not take effect until administrative security is activated. The settings include the authentication of users, the use of SSL, and the choice of user account repository. In particular, application security, including authentication and role-based authorization, is not enforced unless administrative security is active. Administrative security is enabled by default.

Administrative security need not be activated in order for WebSphere applications to make use of JSSE methods to encrypt communication to remote sites.

Administrative security represents the security configuration that is effective for the entire security domain. A security domain consists of all of the servers configured with the same user registry realm name. In some cases, the realm can be the machine name of a local operating system registry. In this case, all of the application servers must reside on the same physical machine. In other cases, the realm can be the machine name of a stand-alone LDAP registry.

A multiple node configuration is supported because we can access remotely user registries that support the LDAP protocol. Therefore, we can enable authentication from anywhere.

The basic requirement for a security domain is that the access ID returned by the registry or repository from one server within the security domain is the same access ID as that returned from the registry or repository on any other server within the same security domain. The access ID is the unique identification of a user and is used during authorization to determine if access is permitted to the resource.

The administrative security configuration applies to every server within the security domain.

Why turn on administrative security?

Turning on administrative security activates the settings that protect your server from unauthorized users. Administrative security is enabled by default during the profile creation time. There might be some environments where no security is needed such as a development system. On these systems we can elect to disable administrative security. However, in most environments you should keep unauthorized users from accessing the administrative console and the business applications. Administrative security must be enabled to restrict access.

What does administrative security protect?

The configuration of administrative security for a security domain involves configuring the following technologies:

• Authentication of HTTP clients

• Authentication of IIOP clients

• Administrative console security

• Naming security

• Use of SSL transports

• Role-based authorization checks of servlets, enterprise beans, and mbeans

• Propagation of identities (RunAs)

• (zos) CBIND checks

• The common user registry

• The authentication mechanism

• Other security information that defines the behavior of a security domain includes:

  • The authentication protocol (Remote Method Invocation over the Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (RMI/IIOP) security)

  • Other miscellaneous attributes

IBM recommends that before registering a node with an administrative agent process, that you first have administrative security enabled in the administrative agent and base profile. Once you register a profile with the administrative agent, the state of administrative security enablement cannot be changed.

Subtopics

• Server and administrative security
  The term administrative security refers to providing the authentication of users that use the WebSphere administration functions, the use of SSL, and the choice of user account repository.

• (zos) Java thread identity and an operating system thread identity
  We can specify options to synchronize a Java thread identity and an operating system thread identity.

Related tasks

Enable security

Security considerations when adding a base Application Server node to WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment