+

Search Tips   |   Advanced Search


Develop applications > Develop security > Develop extensions to the WebSphere security infrastructure

Develop stand-alone custom registries

This development provides considerable flexibility in adapting WebSphere Application Server security to various environments where some notion of a user registry, other than LDAP or Local OS, already exists in the operational environment.

WAS security supports the use of stand-alone custom registries in addition to the local operating system registry, stand-alone LDAP registries, and federated repositories for authentication and authorization purposes. A stand-alone custom-implemented registry uses the UserRegistry Java interface as provided by WAS. A stand-alone custom-implemented registry can support virtually any type or notion of an accounts repository from a relational database, flat file, and so on.

Implement a stand-alone custom registry is a software development effort. Implement the methods defined in the com.ibm.websphere.security.UserRegistry interface to make calls to the appropriate registry to obtain user and group information. The interface defines a general set of methods for encapsulating a wide variety of registries. We can configure a stand-alone custom registry as the selected repository when configuring WAS security on the Global security panel.

In WAS v8.5, verify your implementation of the stand-alone custom registry does not depend on any WAS components such as data sources, EJB and JNDI. We can not have this dependency because security is initialized and enabled prior to most of the other WAS components during startup. If our previous implementation used these components, make a change that eliminates the dependency. For example, if the previous implementation used data sources to connect to a database, instead use the JDBC java.sql.DriverManager interface to connect to the database.

If our previous implementation uses data sources to connect to a database, change the implementation to use Java database connectivity (JDBC) connections.

  1. Implement all the methods in the interface except for the CreateCredential method, which is implemented by WAS. FileRegistrySample.java file is provided for reference.

    The sample provided is intended to familiarize you with this feature. Do not use this sample in an actual production environment.

  2. Build your implementation.

    To compile your code, we need the app_server_root/plugins/com.ibm.ws.runtime.jar and the app_server_root/plugins/com.ibm.ws.security.crypto.jar files in your class path. For example:

    app_server_root/java/bin/javac -classpath 
    app_server_root/plugins/com.ibm.ws.runtime.jar;
    app_server_root/plugins/com.ibm.ws.security.crypto.jar your_implementation_file.java

    app_server_root\java\bin\javac -classpath 
    app_server_root\plugins\com.ibm.ws.runtime.jar:
    app_server_root\plugins\com.ibm.ws.security.crypto.jar your_implementation_file.java
  3. Copy the class files generated in the previous step to the product class path.

    The preferred location is the following directory:

    • %install_root%/lib/ext

      %install_root%\lib\ext

    directory. Copy these class files to all of the product process class paths.

  4. To configure your implementation using the dmgr console, follow the steps in topics about configuring stand-alone custom registries. This step is required to implement custom user registries.


Example

View stand-alone custom registries.

Use these links to view registry examples.

A stand-alone custom registry is a customer-implemented registry that implements the UserRegistry Java interface, as provided by WAS. A custom-implemented registry can support virtually any type or form of an accounts repository from a relational database, flat file, and so on. The custom registry provides considerable flexibility in adapting WAS security to various environments where some form of a registry, other than a federated repository, LDAP registry, or local operating system registry, already exist in the operational environment.

To view a sample stand-alone custom registry, refer to the following files:

If we enable security, verify completing the remaining steps:

  1. Save and synchronize the configuration and restart all of the servers.
  2. Try accessing some J2EE resources to verify the custom registry implementation is correct.


Subtopics


Related


Develop extensions to the WebSphere security infrastructure
Configure stand-alone custom registries


Reference:

UserRegistry.java files
FileRegistrySample.java file
Stand-alone custom registry settings
users.props file
groups.props file


+

Search Tips   |   Advanced Search