Assigning Message Security Responsibilities

In the Application Server, the System Administrator and Application Deployer roles are expected to take primary responsibility for configuring message security. In some situations, the Application Developer may also contribute, although in the typical case either of the other roles may secure an existing application without changing its implementation without involving the developer. The responsibilities of the various roles are defined in the following sections:

• System Administrator

• Application Deployer

• Application Developer

System Administrator

The system administrator is responsible for:

• Configuring message security providers on the Application Server.

• Managing user databases.

• Managing keystore and truststore files.

• Configuring a Java Cryptography Extension (JCE) provider if using encryption and running a version of the Java SDK prior to version 1.5.0.

• Installing the samples server. This is only done if the xms sample application will be used to demonstrate the use of message layer web services security.

A system administrator uses the Admin Console to manage server security settings and uses a command line tool to manage certificate databases. In Platform Edition, certificates and private keys are stored in key stores and are managed with keytool. Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition store certificates and private keys in an NSS database, where they are managed using certutil. This document is intended primarily for system administrators. For an overview of message security tasks, see Configuring the Application Server for Message Security.

Application Deployer

The application deployer is responsible for:

• Specifying (at application assembly) any required application-specific message protection policies if such policies have not already been specified by upstream roles (the developer or assembler).

• Modifying Sun-specific deployment descriptors to specify application-specific message protection policies information (message-security-binding elements) to web service endpoint and service references.

These security tasks are discussed in the Securing Applications chapter of the Developers’ Guide. For a link to this chapter, see Further Information.

Application Developer

The application developer can turn on message security, but is not responsible for doing so. Message security can be set up by the System Administrator so that all web services are secured, or by the Application Deployer when the provider or protection policy bound to the application must be different from that bound to the container.

The application developer or assembler is responsible for the following:

• Determining if an application-specific message protection policy is required by the application. If so, ensuring that the required policy is specified at application assembly which may be accomplished by communicating with the Application Deployer.