Security considerations for Rational® Test Control Panel
You must ensure that your installation is secure, customize your security settings, and set up user access controls. Also, you must know about any security limitations that you might encounter with this server application.
Enabling security during installation
- Select from a variety of user authentication options, including a default built-in
option, an Active Directory option, a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)
option, or no authentication (see Managing users.) For Active
Directory or LDAP, authentication is through a user name and a password specified during
the installation of
Rational® Test Control
Panel. If
you already have access to an Active Directory or LDAP environment, verify the access to
Rational® Test Control
Panel by logging into the
environment and checking whether you can see the pages. This verification process can be
extended to see whether you have standard or administrator privileges in
Rational® Test Control
Panel.Important: When you install or upgrade Rational® Test Control Panel in console mode, you cannot choose Active Directory or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) for the security model. These options are available in the GUI version of the Installation Manager only. For information about how to configure Active Directory or LDAP after installing Rational® Test Control Panel (in GUI mode or in console mode), see Configuring the security settings after installation by updating the security.config file.
Rational® Test Control Panel includes an HTTP/TCP proxy, with SSL and a custom key pair/certificate for the HTTPS proxy. You can replace the certificate by updating the existing keystore that is referenced in the configuration file of the proxy or by using a new one. See Modifying the configuration settings of the HTTP/TCP proxy.
Enabling secure communication between multiple applications
Rational® Test Control Panel does not support single sign-on.
Ports, protocols, and services
Port 7883 is used for the Topology Discovery view. Rational® Integration Tester creates a TCP connection to the Rational® Test Control Panel on this port and periodically receives information about the resources that are observed by the proxies and intercepts.
When you use IBM® Installation Manager to install Rational® Test Control Panel on Microsoft™ Windows™ systems, by default, Windows™ services are configured to run Rational® Test Control Panel and the HTTP/TCP proxy at startup but you can change this setting during installation. These services are executed using the Local System account. After the installation, use Windows™ Service Control Manager to modify or disable the services.
All communications with
Rational® Test Control
Panel are
by default HTTPS on port 5443 (see Network ports). You can change the
port number after installation and also enable plain HTTP. For details, see Configuring the server HTTP Endpoint. The first time
you create an
Rational® Integration
Tester project, the
Rational® Test Control
Panel URL defaults to
https://localhost:5443/RTCP and the port value that you use for the
creation of a project becomes the default value for all the new projects.
Customizing your security settings
- Customization of pages is not supported.
- No forms of notifications are supported.
- All successful and unsuccessful login attempts are stored in an audit log, which Rational® Test Control Panel administrators can view on the Administration page.
- If the built-in user-authentication option is enabled, passwords are hashed and stored in a way that is similar to the security on Unix-like systems, and there is no way to change this setting. See Managing users.
- Rational® Test Control Panel supports domain level security. Only Rational® Test Control Panel system administrators can enable and disable domain level security. See Enabling and disabling domain-level security.
- The server by default provides a truststore. You can configure the server to use a custom truststore for server SSL connections. For details, see Using your own truststore for server SSL connections.
Setting up user roles and access
- The built-in security option, where the default administrator user that is created during installation uses the Administration page in Rational® Test Control Panel to create additional users, and there are no rules for passwords.
- The Active Directory option or the LDAP option, where you map the groups to the system administrator or normal user type.
Domain level security and tokens
- Domain administrator
- Domain user
- Domain API user
When the domain level security is enabled, the agents and proxies must be configured to enable registering with the domain. The access to the secured domain for the agents and proxies can be implemented by using security tokens.
In Rational® Test Control Panel, the security token is generated for a user. The generated security token is then specified in the registration.xml file (for proxy) and Agent.config file (for agent) to enable access to the secured domain.
Security limitations
The built-in security of Rational® Test Control Panel is used to store the user names and passwords as hashes in a file for user authentication. Passwords for further remote access, for example, when configuring access to an Rational® Integration Tester project results database, are stored in an obfuscated form. See Configuring the project results database.
In versions earlier than 8.5.1.1, Apache Ant tasks and REST interface do not require authentication, so actions that are done by using these interfaces are unsecure.
In 8.5.1.1 or later, domain level security can be enabled. When domain level security is enabled, the REST API can be accessed only with a valid security key. See Enabling and disabling domain-level security.