Agent Guide › Introduction › Overview

Overview

The SiteMinder Agent for IBM WebSphere provides a complete SiteMinder-based access control solution for IBM WebSphere Application Server 7.0. The SiteMinder Agent integrates the WebSphere Application Server into the SiteMinder environment, enabling you to implement policy-based access control to protect your WebSphere-hosted web applications and Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) resources.

The SiteMinder Agent for IBM WebSphere resides in a WebSphere Application Server, enabling you to extend the SiteMinder environment to protect WebSphere-hosted resources (in the Web and EJB containers). The following illustration shows a high-level example environment.

The SiteMinder Agent for IBM WebSphere provides the following features:

• SiteMinder Integration with the J2EE platform
• Fine-grained access control of the following J2EE resources:
  • Web Applications (including servlets, HTML pages, JSP, image files)
  • EJB components
• Support for bi-directional SiteMinder and WebSphere single sign-on (SSO)
• Support for WebSphere clustering

The SiteMinder Agent additionally supports:

• FIPS 140-2
• IPv6
• J2EE RunAs identity
• EJB standalone client applications
• Multibyte character usernames
• User mapping to support environments in which WebSphere and SiteMinder are not configured to use the same user store
• Centralized and dynamic agent configurations
• Caching of resource protection decisions and authentication and authorization decisions
• Web application error page processing (so that failure to answer an authentication request results in redirection to an error page)
• Logging
• Authorization auditing