Administering Operating System (OS) Security

In addition to the security features in the ATMI environment of the BEA Tuxedo product, the application administrator needs to take full advantage of the security features of the host operating system to control access to files, directories, and system resources.

Most ATMI applications are managed by an application administrator who configures and boots the application, monitors the running application, and makes changes to it dynamically, as necessary. Because the ATMI application is started and run by the administrator, server programs are run with the administrator's permissions and are therefore considered secure or "trusted." This working method is supported by the login mechanism and the read and write permissions on the files, directories, and system resources provided by the underlying operating system.

Clients, on the other hand, are not started by the administrator. Instead, they are run directly by users with their own permissions. As a result, clients are not trusted.

In addition, users running native clients (that is, clients running on the same machine on which the server is running) have access to the configuration file and interprocess communication (IPC) mechanisms such as the bulletin board (in shared memory). Users running native clients always have such access, even when additional ATMI security is configured.

Recommended Practices for OS Security

As the administrator, you can improve operating system security by observing the following general rules:

See Also