IBM WebSphere V5.0 Security - CGISecurity

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Messages sent and received can participate in distributed transactions.
The JMS specifications do not discuss the security and encryption of the
message that is getting transferred using the JMS provider. Instead,
specifications leave the security implementation to the JMS provider. We are
going to discuss WebSphere MQ as a JMS provider.
Security services
This section will investigate the five security services for messaging.
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Authentication is a mechanism used to check whether the application or the
user is genuine or not. In a WebSphere MQ context, when a message
channel starts, it is possible for the message channel agent (MCA) at each
end of the channel to authenticate its partner, known as mutual
authentication. For the sending MCA, this provides assurance that the
partner it is about to send messages to is genuine. And for the receiving
MCA, there is a similar assurance that it is about to receive messages from a
genuine partner.
The application that handles the messaging has to perform the
authentication; for example: when a servlet sends a message WebSphere
has to authenticate the user if he/she can run the servlet. Since there is no
message level security (who can send what type of message) message level
should be considered during application design.
Authorization for the WebSphere MQ objects is stored in MQ (actually in a
special queue). WebSphere MQ uses normal operating system user name
and group authorizations to protect WebSphere MQ applications and
WebSphere MQ Administration.
Access Control (ACL) can be defined for each object. This Access Control
service protects critical resources in a system by limiting access only to
authorized users and their applications. It prevents the unauthorized user of
an object. For example, you can define Access Control so that it only allows
that particular application to connect to a queue manager if the user ID
associated with the application is authorized to do so.
Confidentiality: many times you will need to protect the message from
unauthorized disclosure and you do not want to ignore the message content
confidentiality when the message is travelling over an insecure network such
as the Internet. In such cases, there is no help that we can get from Access
Control definitions. What we need here is message encryption. For example,
after sending the message MCA gets it from the transmission queue, the
message is encrypted before it is sent over the network to the receiving MCA.
At the other end of the channel, the message is decrypted before the
receiving MCA puts it on its destination queue.
160 IBM WebSphere V5.0 Security Handbook