Use secure conversation to secure Web services application messages.
Applications that contain Web services must have been deployed.
The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) Web Services Secure Conversation (WS-SecureConversation) draft specification describes ways to establish a secure session between the initiator and recipient of SOAP messages. The WS-SecureConversation draft specification also defines how to use the OASIS Web Services Trust (WS-Trust) protocol to establish a security context token (SCT). For complete information, see the OASIS Web Services Secure Conversation specification.
WebSphere Application Server supports the ability of an endpoint to issue a security context token for WS-SecureConversation, and thereby provides a secure session between the initiator and recipient of SOAP messages.
The following figure describes the flow that is required to establish a secured context and to use session-based security.
In the WS-SecureConversation specification, a security context is represented by the <wsc:SecurityContextToken> security token. The following example represents the assertion syntax for a <wsc:SecurityContextToken> element.
<wsc:SecurityContextToken wsu:Id="..." ...> <wsc:Identifier>...</wsc:Identifier> <wsc:Instance>...</wsc:Instance> ... </wsc:SecurityContextToken>
The security context token does not support references to it by using key identifiers or key names. All references must either use an ID (to a wsu:Id attribute) or a <wsse:Reference> to the <wsc:Identifier> element.
WebSphere Application Server provides these pre-configured secure conversation-related polices:
In this example, the default SecureConversation policy set, and the default WS-Security binding and TrustServiceSecurityDefault binding are used to achieve the task of enabling secure conversation. The default SecureConversation policy set has both the application policy (symmetricBinding) and the bootstrap policy (asymmetricBinding). The application policy is used to secure application messages and the bootstrap policy is used to secure the RequestSecurityToken (RST) messages.
A trust service that issues a security context token is configured with the TrustServiceSecurityDefault system policy and the TrustServiceSecurityDefault binding. The trust policy is responsible for securing RequestSecurityTokenResponse (RSTR) messages. If the bootstrap policy is modified, the trust policy has to be modified to match both of the configurations.
The Web Services Security (WS-Security) default bindings that are used here contain sample key files and must be customized before use in a production. For the production environment, use of custom bindings is advised. Also note that, if the profile is created by using the choice of Create the server using the development template, you can skip steps 2 and 3.
To configure secure conversation, configure the policy set, and add a policy assertion to the policy, complete the following steps:
Next, review the example scenario about how to establish a security context token to secure a secure conversation.
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