Policy Server Guides › Policy Server Administration Guide › Policy Server Management › Policy Server Management Overview › Policy Server Operations

Policy Server Operations

The Policy Server provide access control and single sign-on. It typically runs on a separate Windows or UNIX system, and performs the following key security operations:

• Authentication—The Policy Server supports a range of authentication methods. It can authenticate users based on user names and passwords, using tokens, using forms based authentication, and through public-key certificates.
• Authorization—The Policy Server is responsible for managing and enforcing access control rules established by Policy Server administrators. These rules define the operations that are allowed for each protected resource.
• Administration—The Policy Server can be configured using the Administrative UI. The Administration service of the Policy Server is what enables the UI to record configuration information in the Policy Store. The Policy Store is the database that contains entitlement information.
• Accounting—The Policy Server generates log files that contain auditing information about the events that occur within the system. These logs can be printed in the form of predefined reports, so that security events or anomalies can be analyzed.
• Health Monitoring—Policy Server provides health monitoring components.

The following diagram illustrates a simple implementation of a Policy Server in a SiteMinder environment that includes a single SiteMinder Web Agent.

In a Web implementation, a user requests a resource through a browser. That request is received by the Web Server and intercepted by the SiteMinder Web Agent. The Web Agent determines whether or not the resource is protected, and if so, gathers the user's credentials and passes them to the Policy Server. The Policy Server authenticates the user against native user directories, then verifies if the authenticated user is authorized for the requested resource based on rules and policies contained in the Policy Store. When a user is authenticated and authorized, the Policy Server grants access to protected resources and delivers privilege and entitlement information.

Note: Custom Agents can be created using the SiteMinder Agent API. For more information, see the Programming Guide for C.