Louis Mauget

Lightweight Directory Authentication Protocol (LDAP) is often promoted as a means to leverage an organizational directory as a principal registry for WebSphere authentication and authorization. Advantages include the capability to configure single sign-on across application servers, enabling additional organizational applications, centralized user administration, multimastered replication across authentication sites, and flexible, extensible data formats - not to mention that LDAP is a vendor-neutral protocol and API backed by IETF. This begs the question of how to implement WebSphere security through LDAP. This two-part series presents a simplified example of how to configure WebSphere Application Server version 5.0 to use IBM Directory Server v5.1 as its user registry for J2EE application user authentication and role-based authorization. This registry enables the... (more)

Implementing WebSphere Security Through LDAP

The use of Lightweight Directory Authentication Protocol (LDAP) for WebSphere authentication and authorization offers the advantages of single sign-on across application servers and a vendor-neutral protocol and API. Part 1 of this two-part series showed how to set up a directory and sample application infrastructure for demonstrating WebSphere authentication using LDAP. In Part 2 I take you through the process of setting up LDAP authentication for WebSphere through the following tasks: Defining roles and constraints in the Web application deployment descriptor Mapping roles to LD... (more)