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IBM distinguished engineer talks SOA security



David Worthington
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August 12, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 2)
In a service-oriented architecture, where boundaries are exposed and services are loosely coupled, identity management, policy enforcement and some automation are required to secure information, says an IBM distinguished engineer.

Raj Nagaratnam, IBM distinguished engineer and chief architect of identity and SOA security, discussed with SD Times the crucial role that he believes identity management plays in SOA security.

Nagaratnam said that federating identity across boundaries is important in a SOA pattern. One method of doing that is to utilize an ID service that acts as an identity medication hub. Different authentication is required along the spectrum of trust, he noted.

For instance, OpenID is suitable for authentication when no critical enterprise data is exposed, whereas SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) enterprise-level scenarios provide stronger security, he noted.

IBM renders its Tivoli Federated Identity Manger software as a Web service, so it can integrate “into the SOA flow” with a third-party enterprise service bus or mediation appliance, he said. He added that identity information in a SOA context is necessary for providing service level agreements.

“The service can be used as part of a business process to render entitlements and [business] rules,” he explained.

By extension to identity as a service, IBM realized that developers also need a consistent way to enforce policies for compliance in a loosely coupled environment. Not only should users have identities, but services must have identities as well, he explained.

As an example, a claim service may need to access a credit check service on behalf of a company’s claims department. It will have its identity taken into account and be granted access. Policies provide for that capability at enforcement points like ESBs and token services.

Tying identity to policy-driven entitlements is the next level of granularity IBM will offer, Nagaratnam said. Big Blue will be introducing a product called Tivoli Security Policy Manager later this year that will offer policy management with WS-Policy and OASIS’ eXtensible Access Control Markup Language.

Policy management is particularly useful for composite applications, where different services are composed together, he noted. Security Policy Manager will use metadata as context for managing entitlements. Policies factor in metadata about services, the service provider and the environment that is being used to access it, he explained.



Related Search Term(s): identity management, security, SOA & SaaS, Tivoli, IBM

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