Protecting Passwords with SSL

Passwords are not protected for confidentiality with HTTP basic or form-based authentication, meaning that passwords sent between a client and a server on an unprotected session can be viewed and intercepted by third parties. To overcome this limitation, you can run these authentication protocols over an SSL-protected session and ensure that all message content is protected for confidentiality.

A <transport-guarantee> element indicates whether or not the protected resources should travel over protected transport. For simplicity, this example does not require protected transport, but in a real world application, you would want to set this value to CONFIDENTIAL to ensure that the user name and password are not observed during transmission. When running on protected transport, you can run the application over the secure SSL protocol, https, and specify the secure port where your SSL connector is created (the default for the Application Server is 8181). If you do not specify the HTTPS protocol, the server will automatically redirect the application to the secure port.