Implementing trust association custom interceptors
 Technote (FAQ)
 
Problem
If you enable trust association between WebSphere® Application Server V4.0 and a proxy server other than Tivoli® WebSEAL, for which a trust association interceptor class is provided, you must implement your own custom interceptor class. When using a configuration file for a custom interceptor class, WebSphereBaseTrustAssociationInterceptor must be extended.
 
Solution
Section 5.6.3 of the WebSphere Application Server V4.0 information center documents how to do this. It should be noted, however, that if you add a line in the trustedservers.properties to use a custom configuration file for the interceptor, you MUST extend the abstract class WebSphereBaseTrustAssociationInterceptor in addition to implementing the TrustAssociationInterceptor interface.

For example, your trustedservers.properties file might look something like this:

com.ibm.websphere.security.trustassociation.enabled=true
com.ibm.websphere.security.trustassociation.types=myproxy
com.ibm.websphere.security.trustassociation.myproxy.interceptor=myinterceptor
com.ibm.websphere.security.trustassociation.myproxy.config=myproxyconfig

The last line specifies a configuration file for the interceptor class. When the abstract class is not implemented, the WebSphere code that initializes the trust association interceptor issues an exception, then DISABLES trust association. The tracefile says that the interceptor class was successfully loaded, but gives no indication that trust association is disabled. You notice only that trust association does not work properly. For instance, WebSphere might try to authenticate users for a secured resource, which should be done by the proxy server.

To fix this, you must implement the abstract class indicated above. The tracing for trust association initialization is improved in WebSphere Application Server V4.0.3 and subsequent releases to help you better debug this if you encounter this problem.
 
 
 


Document Information


Product categories: Software > Application Servers > Distributed Application & Web Servers > WebSphere Application Server > Security
Operating system(s): HP-UX
Software version: 4.0
Software edition:
Reference #: 1050215
IBM Group: Software Group
Modified date: Jul 27, 2004