WebLogic: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 17. Security

WebLogic provides a comprehensive suite of security services that can be used to protect all aspects of a domain and its deployments. These security services affect all aspects of your domain: from the lowest level provided by the Java Security Manager, to connection-level security, to application-level security in which you can protect your administered and deployed objects (such as EJBs, web services, and JDBC pools), and finally to domain-level security in which you can establish trust between two domains. These security services target three distinct sets of users: application developers who can use the services to secure their applications; administrators who need to configure security for the system and deployments; and security vendors or customers who can change and extend the facilities provided by WebLogic.

Let’s begin at the JVM level. Here, the Java Security Manager uses a security policy file to restrict access to specific runtime operations. This ensures that programs running on the JVM, including WebLogic Server itself, can access protected resources in permitted ways only. For instance, you can configure the Java Security Manager so that all Java threads have write-access only to specific directories in the filesystem. WebLogic enhances the Security Manager by allowing you to define additional security policies for resource adapters and EJBs, thereby ensuring that these components have access to defined resources only. There are also other global, ...