About Identity Web Services

A web service is a black-box component that can be accessed using exposed endpoints. OpenSSO Enterprise uses this concept to expose the following security and identity related functions as Identity Web Services:

• authenticate (user credential verification)

• authorize (an authenticated identity's access permission)

• attributes (an authenticated identity's profile)

• log (record and audit actions)

Identity Web Services allow developers to easily invoke these functions without any knowledge of OpenSSO Enterprise, resolving the problems of enabling web service discovery and invocation, security, privacy and ease-of-deployment. Keeping Identity Web Services simple allows an application developer to consume them by pointing an integrated development environment (IDE) to the service's URL and allowing it to generate the stub code that wraps a call to the service. Identity Web Services are supported on:

• NetBeans

• Eclipse

• Visual Studio

Identity Web Services does not require the Client SDK or deployment of an agent or proxy to protect a resource.

Within Identity Web Services the user enters authentication credentials using a JavaServer Pages (JSP). The user data is then forwarded to the composite application which authenticates the web service request. The application may then authorize the operation and obtain the user's profile. See Identity Web Service Styles for more information.