Programming Stand-alone Clients

      

Developing Security-Aware Clients

You can develop Weblogic clients that use the Java Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). The following sections provide information on security-aware clients:

 

Developing Clients That Use JAAS

JAAS enforces access controls based on user identity and is the preferred method of authentication for WebLogic Server clients. A typical use case is providing authentication to read or write to a file. Users requiring client certificate authentication (also referred to as two-way SSL authentication) should use JNDI authentication. For more information on how to implement JAAS authentication, see Using JAAS Authentication in Java Clients.

 

Developing Clients That Use SSL

WebLogic Server provides Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) support for encrypting data transmitted between WebLogic Server clients and servers, Java clients, Web browsers, and other servers.

All SSL clients need to specify trust. Trust is a set of CA certificates that specify which trusted certificate authorities are trusted by the client. In order to establish an SSL connection, RMI clients need to trust the certificate authorities that issued the server's digital certificates. The location of the server's trusted CA certificate is specified when starting the RMI client.

By default, all trusted certificate authorities available from the JDK (...\jre\lib\security\cacerts) are trusted by RMI clients. However, if the server's trusted CA certificate is stored in one of the following types of trust keystores, you need to specify certain command line arguments in order to use the keystore:

When using the keytool utility, the default key pair generation algorithm is DSA. WebLogic Server does not support the use of the Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA). Specify another key pair generation and signature algorithm when using WebLogic Server.

You can find more information on how to implement SSL in “Configuring SSL” and “Configuring Identity and Trust” in Securing WebLogic Server.

 

Thin-Client Restrictions for JAAS and SSL

WebLogic thin-client applications only support JAAS authentication through the following classes:

WebLogic thin-clients only support two-way SSL by requiring the SSLContext to be provided by the SECURITY_CREDENTIALS property. For example, see the client code below: Listing 12-1 Client Code with sslcontext 

.

.

.

// Get a KeyManagerFactory for KeyManagers

System.out.println("Retrieving KeyManagerFactory & initializing");

    KeyManagerFactory kmf =     KeyManagerFactory.getInstance("SunX509","SunJSSE");

    kmf.init(ks,keyStorePassword);



// Get and initialize an SSLContext

System.out.println("Initializing the SSLContext");

    SSLContext sslCtx = SSLContext.getInstance("SSL");

    sslCtx.init(kmf.getKeyManagers(),null,null);



// Pass the SSLContext to the initial context factory and get an

// InitialContext

System.out.println("Getting initial context");

    Hashtable props = new Hashtable();      props.put(Context.INITIAL_CONTEXT_FACTORY,

        "weblogic.jndi.WLInitialContextFactory");

    props.put(Context.PROVIDER_URL,

        "corbaloc:iiops:" +

         host + ":" + port +

        "/NameService");

    props.put(Context.SECURITY_PRINCIPAL,"weblogic");

    props.put(Context.SECURITY_CREDENTIALS, sslCtx);

    Context ctx = new InitialContext(props);

.

.

.

 

Security Code Examples

Security samples are provided with the WebLogic Server product. The samples are located in the SAMPLES_HOME\server\examples\src\examples\security directory. A description of each sample and instructions on how to build, configure, and run a sample, are provided in the package-summary.html file. You can modify these code examples and reuse them.