Sun Microsystems 820433510 manual Tools for Managing Security

Tools for Managing Security

■In declarative security, the container (the Enterprise Server) handles security through an application's deployment descriptors. You can control declarative security by editing deployment descriptors directly or with a tool such as deploytool. Because deployment descriptors can change after an application is developed, declarative security allows for more flexibility.

In addition to application security, there is also system security, which affects all the applications on an Enterprise Server system.

Programmatic security is controlled by the application developer, so this document does not discuss it; declarative security is somewhat less so, and this document touches on it occasionally. This document is intended primarily for system administrators, and so focuses on system security.

Tools for Managing Security

The Enterprise Server provides the following tools for managing security:

■Admin Console, a browser-based tool used to configure security for the entire server, to manage users, groups, and realms, and to perform other system-wide security tasks. For a general introduction to the Admin Console, see “Tools for Administration” on page 24. For an overview of the security tasks consult the Admin Console online help.

■asadmin, a command-line tool that performs many of the same tasks as the Admin Console. You may be able to do some things with asadmin that you cannot do with Admin Console. You perform asadmin commands from either a command prompt or from a script, to automate repetitive tasks. For a general introduction to asadmin, see “Tools for Administration” on page 24.

The Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) provides two tools for managing security:

■keytool, a command-line utility for managing digital certificates and key pairs. Use keytool to manage users in the certificate realm.

■policytool, a graphical utility for managing system-wide Java security policies. As an administrator, you will rarely need to use policytool.

For more information on using keytool, policytool, and other Java security tools, see JDK Tools and Utilities at http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/tooldocs/#security.

In the Enterprise Profile, two other tools that implement Network Security Services (NSS) are available for managing security. For more information on NSS, go to http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/pki/nss/. The tools for managing security include the following:

■certutil, a command-line utility for managing certificates and key databases.

■pk12util, a command-line utility used to import and export keys and certificates between the certificate/key databases and files in PKCS12 format.

98 Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server 2.1 Administration Guide • December 2008