Application security

Application security enables security for the applications in your environment. This type of security provides application isolation and requirements for authenticating application users

In previous releases of WebSphere® Application Server, when a user enabled global security, both administrative and application security were enabled. In WebSphere Application Server Version 6.1, the previous notion of global security is split into administrative security and application security, each of which you can enable separately.

As a result of this split, WebSphere Application Server clients must know whether application security is disabled at the target server. Administrative security is enabled, by default. Application security is disabled, by default. Before you can enable application security, you must verify that administrative security is enabled. Application security is in effect only when administrative security is enabled.

An Application Server Enablement Tag, which is specific to WebSphere Application Server, is imported into the Interoperable Object Reference (IOR) to indicate if application security is disabled for the server where the object lives. This tag is server-specific and enables clients to know when application security is disabled at the target server of its request.

For Web resources, when application security is enabled, security constraints on those resources in web.xml are enforced. When accessing a protected resource, a web client is prompted for authentication.

For enterprise bean resources, when application security is disabled, the client Common Secure Interoperability version 2 (CSIv2) code ignores the CSIv2 security tags for objects that are unknown system objects. When pure clients see that application security is disabled, these clients prompt for naming lookups, but do not prompt for enterprise bean operations.

source: ibm.com