WAS v8.5 > Develop applications > Develop web services - Security (WS-Security) > Develop applications that use Web Services Security > Develop message-level security for JAX-WS web services

Develop JAX-WS based web services server applications that retrieve security tokens

With a server application, the application acts as the request consumer, and the response generator is deployed and runs in the Java EE container. The consumer component for Web Services Security stores the security tokens that it receives in the JAAS Subject of the current thread. We can retrieve the security tokens from the JAAS Subject that is maintained as a local thread in the container. This information applies only to Java API for XML-based Web Services (JAX-WS).

The security handlers are responsible for propagating security tokens. These security tokens are embedded in the SOAP security header and passed to downstream servers. The security tokens are encapsulated in the implementation classes for the com.ibm.wsspi.wssecurity.auth.token.Token interface. We can retrieve the security token data from either a server application or a client application.

To retrieve the security token data from a server application:

1. Obtain the JAAS Subject of the current thread using the WSSubject API. If you enable Java 2 Security on the Global security panel in the dmgr console, access to the JAAS Subject is denied if the application code is not granted the javax.security.auth.AuthPermission("wssecurity.getCallerSubject") permission. The following code sample shows how to obtain the JAAS subject:

   javax.security.auth.Subject subject;
   
   try {
   subject = com.ibm.websphere.security.auth.WSSubject.getCallerSubject();} catch (com.ibm.websphere.security.WSSecurityException e) {
     …}

2. Obtain a set of private credentials from the Subject. For more information, see the API com.ibm.websphere.security.auth.WSSubject class through the information center . To access this information within the information center, click Reference > Developer > API Documentation > Application Programming Interfaces. In the Application Programming Interfaces article, click com.ibm.websphere.security.auth > WSSubject.

   When Java 2 Security is enabled, we might need to use the AccessController class to avoid a security violation that is caused by operating the security objects in the Java EE container.

   The following code sample shows how to set the AccessController class and obtain the private credentials:

   Set s = (Set) AccessController.doPrivileged(new PrivilegedAction() {
      public Object run() {
      return subj.getPrivateCredentials();
      }
         });

3. Search the targeting token class in the private credentials. We can search the targeting token class using the java.util.Iterator interface. The following example shows how to retrieve a username token with a certain token ID value in the security header. We can also use other method calls to retrieve security tokens. For more information, see the API documents for the com.ibm.wsspi.wssecurity.auth.token.Token interface or custom token classes.

   com.ibm.wsspi.wssecurity.auth.token.UsernameToken unt;
   Iterator it = s.iterator();
   while (it.hasNext()) {
     Object obj = it.next();
     if (obj != null &&
   obj instanceOf com.ibm.wsspi.wssecurity.auth.token.UsernameToken) {
       unt =(com.ibm.wsspi.wssecurity.auth.token.UsernameToken) obj;
   if (unt.getId().equals(“…”)) break;
   else continue;
     }}

Results

After completing these steps, we have retrieved the security tokens from the JAAS Subject in a server application.

Related concepts:

Security token

Related

Develop JAX-WS based web services client applications that retrieve security tokens
Protecting system resources and APIs (Java 2 security) for developing applications
Configure Java 2 security policy files

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