Application Security

3.0

2.0

1.0

You can configure Open Liberty to authenticate and authorize users by using a basic user registry. The basic user registry contains user credentials that applications need for security-related tasks. To configure a basic user registry, the Application Security feature must be enabled in the server.xml file. The following example shows the configuration of a basic user registry in the server.xml file:

To configure a basic user registry with multiple users, you can create groups for users with unique group names as shown in the following example:

When you want to configure a basic user registry, you can use the quickStartSecurity element to automatically configure a registry that grants the administrator role to a user. The administrator role gives the user the authority to manage applications. To configure a basic user registry with the quickStartSecurity element, the Application Security feature must be enabled in the server.xml file. The following example shows the server.xml file configuration to define the username and password for a user that is granted the administrator role with the quickStartSecurity element:

You can use QuickStart security configuration for test purposes.

When the Application Security feature is enabled, Lightweight Third Party Authentication (LTPA) is enabled by default. You can override the default settings for the ltpa element by configuring the ltpa element in the server.xml file. The following example shows how to configure the ltpa element:

You can replace the attribute values in the example with custom values. LTPA configuration can provide Single Sign-on (SSO) to secure applications. For more information, see Single sign-on (SSO).

You can configure an authentication filter to specify whether certain requests for protected resources are authenticated with LTPA. If the request meets the criteria that are specified in the authentication filter, then the request can authenticate with LTPA to access the protected resource. Conversely, if the request does not meet the criteria that are configured in the LTPA authentication filter, then the user is prompted to provide login credentials. For more information, see Authentication filters.

In the example, request URLs that contain the /SimpleServlet pattern are authenticated by using LTPA SSO authentication. If the ltpa element does not specify the authFilterRef attribute, all requests that include an LTPA cookie are processed by LTPA SSO authentication.

LTPA cookies contain secure tokens that are used to verify user credentials and enable SSO. When you don’t want to rely on LTPA tokens for SSO, you can use other methods, such as a Trust Association Interceptor (TAI), for authentication. A TAI is used to validate HTTP requests between a third-party security server and an Open Liberty server to complete authentication. The following example shows how to disable LTPA cookies for TAI by specifying the disableLtpaCookie attribute with a value of true in the server.xml file:

You can configure management roles for your Open Liberty server to grant users and groups that are defined in a user registry access to select administrative REST APIs. The administrator role (administrator-role) provides read and write access to administrative REST APIs. The reader role (reader-role) provides read-only access to administrative REST APIs. Users who are in the reader role can monitor the server but do not have permission to modify it in any way.

In the following example, a user who is named Bob and a group that is named employees are granted the reader role. A user who is named Wanda and a group that is named managers are granted the administrator role:

If you prefer to use access IDs to identify users or groups, you can use the user-access-id or group-access-id elements, as shown in the following example: