Object and file security

This topic discusses the various objects and files that contain sensitive information and need to be protected.

Secure integrated file system files

In addition to enterprise beans and servlets, WebSphere® Application Server accesses integrated file system stream files. The following files might contain sensitive information. It is recommended that you give these files close consideration to ensure that unauthorized access is not granted.

In the /properties subdirectory of your profile, the following files can contain user IDs and passwords:
- sas.client.props
- soap.client.props
- sas.stdclient.properties
- sas.tools.properties
- wsserver.key
By default, the /properties subdirectory is located in the profile_root directory. Each of the previous files is shipped with *PUBLIC authority set to *EXCLUDE. The QEJBSVR user profile is granted *RW authority to these files. Additional protection is available through password encoding. For more information, see Password encoding and encryption.
In the /etc subdirectory if your profile, protect all of the key (KDB) files and trust (JKS) files that you create for your WebSphere Application Server profile.
For the JKS files, the QEJBSVR user profiles should have *R authority and *PUBLIC should have *EXCLUDE authority.

For the KDB files, the user profile that the web server is running under should have *RX authority and *PUBLIC should have *EXCLUDE authority.

Secure database resources for WebSphere Application Server

WebSphere Application Server uses tables to persist data for user applications such as enterprise beans persistence and servlet session data. You have several options for controlling which user profiles are allowed access to this user data. For more information, see Database access security.

Secure WebSphere Application Server files

When you enable WebSphere Application Server security, the server user profile and password are placed into server configuration files, which should be maintained in a secure way using operating system security. Additionally, you can password protect some WebSphere Application Server resources. These passwords are also placed in server configuration files. The server automatically encodes passwords to deter casual observation, but password encoding alone is not sufficient protection.

The following files are located in the /config subdirectory of your profile and they can contain user identifiers and passwords:

cells/cell_name/security.xml
cells/cell_name/nodes/node_name/resources.xml
cells/cell_name/nodes/node_name/servers/server_name/server.xml

For example, for the default profile, the server_name is server1.

The server user profile and password are used for authenticating the server when it initializes. This authentication is required for the following reasons:

The user ID and password are used as the system identity for the server when an enterprise bean security is deployed to use SYSTEM_IDENTITY for method delegation. In this case, the user ID and password are used when method calls are made from one enterprise bean to another.
The user ID and password are used to authenticate servers for inter-server communication. Because security for these files can be compromised, use a non-default user profile for the server identity and password. The default user profile is QEJBSVR. If you use the local OS user registry, you might choose to create and use a user profile that has no special authorities. For more information, see Running application servers under specific user profiles.

Secure user profiles for WebSphere Application Server

When WebSphere Application Server is first installed, by default, it uses the following user profiles:

QEJB: This profile provides access to some administrative data, including passwords.
QEJBSVR: This profile provides the context in which your WebSphere Application Server runs. For security or administrative purposes, you might want to create other user profiles under which to run various parts of WebSphere Application Server. For more information, see Running application servers under specific user profiles.