Sun OpenSSO Enterprise 8.0 Technical Overview

Security Agents

Authentication agents plug into web containers to provide message level security for web services, and supports both Liberty Alliance Project token profiles as well as Web Services-Interoperability Basic Security Profiles (WS-I BSP). (A profile defines the HTTP exchanges required to transfer XML requests and responses between web service clients and providers.) Authentication agents use an instance of OpenSSO Enterprise for all authentication decisions. Web services requests and responses are passed to the appropriate authentication modules using standard Java representations based on the transmission protocol. An HTTP Authentication Agent or a SOAP Authentication Agent can be used. For more information, see Web Services Security and the Security Token Service.