Installation Guides › Implementation Guide › SOA Security Manager Introduction › SOA Security Manager Overview › SOA Security Manager Architecture and Components › SOA Agents › SOA Agent for Web Servers

SOA Agent for Web Servers

The SOA Agent for Web Servers is an XML-enabled version of the CA SiteMinder Web Agent. It can integrate with the following components:

• A web server to authenticate and authorize requests for access to web services bound to URLs served by that web server.
• A proxy server that handles requests for an application server to authenticate and authorize requests for access to web services hosted by the application server but associated with URLs served by the proxy server.

  Note: This approach is provided only to support upgraded TransactionMinder deployments that use it. For more advanced use cases requiring XML firewall and routing capabilities, CA recommends that you use the CA SOA Security Gateway, which works as a web services proxy and also provides advance routing and XML firewall capabilities

The SOA Agent recognizes requests that meet the following criteria as web service requests to be handled by SOA Security Manager:

• Agent action—POST; all XML message requests are posted. However, SOA Security Manager also provides two other agent actions, ProcessSOAP and ProcessXML, that allow you to create rules that fire for posted requests according to the XML message format.
• Message MIME type—text/xml by default; configurable using the XMLSDKMimeTypes Agent parameter.

All other requests are handled using the core Web Agent functionality of the SOA Agent, letting you also protect other resources on a web server, if you have purchased CA SiteMinder.

Note: For more information about protecting web resources using CA SiteMinder, see the CA SiteMinder Agent Guide.