IBM WebSphere V5.0 Security - CGISecurity

►Messages sent and received can participate in distributed transactions.The JMS specifications do not discuss the security and encryption of themessage that is getting transferred using the JMS provider. Instead,specifications leave the security implementation to the JMS provider. We aregoing to discuss WebSphere MQ as a JMS provider.Security servicesThis section will investigate the five security services for messaging.►►►Authentication is a mechanism used to check whether the application or theuser is genuine or not. In a WebSphere MQ context, when a messagechannel starts, it is possible for the message channel agent (MCA) at eachend of the channel to authenticate its partner, known as mutualauthentication. For the sending MCA, this provides assurance that thepartner it is about to send messages to is genuine. And for the receivingMCA, there is a similar assurance that it is about to receive messages from agenuine partner.The application that handles the messaging has to perform theauthentication; for example: when a servlet sends a message WebSpherehas to authenticate the user if he/she can run the servlet. Since there is nomessage level security (who can send what type of message) message levelshould be considered during application design.Authorization for the WebSphere MQ objects is stored in MQ (actually in aspecial queue). WebSphere MQ uses normal operating system user nameand group authorizations to protect WebSphere MQ applications andWebSphere MQ Administration.Access Control (ACL) can be defined for each object. This Access Controlservice protects critical resources in a system by limiting access only toauthorized users and their applications. It prevents the unauthorized user ofan object. For example, you can define Access Control so that it only allowsthat particular application to connect to a queue manager if the user IDassociated with the application is authorized to do so.Confidentiality: many times you will need to protect the message fromunauthorized disclosure and you do not want to ignore the message contentconfidentiality when the message is travelling over an insecure network suchas the Internet. In such cases, there is no help that we can get from AccessControl definitions. What we need here is message encryption. For example,after sending the message MCA gets it from the transmission queue, themessage 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 thereceiving MCA puts it on its destination queue.160 IBM WebSphere V5.0 Security Handbook