Overview

The JADE Object Manager provides independent forms of security hooks to enable you to incorporate your own security mechanisms into a JADE application. Security hooks are primarily of relevance in environments that allow network access to a JADE server. The security protocols can be implemented by non–JADE clients.

The security hooks provided by the JADE Object Manager are:

• Connection authentication

• Schema source encryption

• Network Remote Procedure Call (RPC) message encryption

• User validation

Each type of security hook has a different purpose and can be configured independently in combination with any other type.

Connection authentication and user validation hooks enable you to install mechanisms to ensure that external agents (either software or human) connecting to a JADE server are both genuine and authorized.

Encryption hooks enable you to incorporate data encryption algorithms of your choice, to make it difficult for anyone monitoring data on the network to observe confidential information (such as credit card numbers) that would otherwise be visible in plain-text form in packets transmitted across a local or wide-area network.

The JADE Object Manager security facilities are server driven; that is, if they are enabled on a server-capable node, client nodes attaching to the server must conform to the security requirements. The environment hosting a JADE server node is assumed to be physically secured from unauthorized tampering, either directly by physical access or indirectly by remote access.

JADE Object Manager security is designed so that it cannot be defeated by disabling or removing security support at the client-side alone, as doing so only prevents the client from being able to connect to a secured JADE server. The JADE Object Manager is responsible for conditionally invoking user hooks only if the hooks are enabled and are correctly defined.

The JADE security libraries provide a:

• Default implementation of the connection authentication hooks

• Dummy ("do nothing") version of the encryption hooks

By default, the JADE implementation of authentication hooks and the dummy encryption hooks are installed and configured with your JADE software, and configuration for all security hooks is enabled. To turn security hooks off, you must manually disable them.