Exploring Identity Services
The Access Manager leverages industry standards including HTTP, XML, Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) in lieu with Web Services Definition Language (WSDL), Security Assertions Markup Language (SAML), the Liberty Alliance Project for federation, and Web Services for identity management. In this section, you'll learn about the identity services offered by FAM via SOAP. You can view the WSDL files by pointing the browser to the respective service. For example, IdentityServices.wsdl can be located at:
http://localhost:9080/fam/identityservices/IdentityServices?WSDL
The main operations of identity services are Authentication, Authorization, Attributes, and Logging. These operations are the backbone of single sign-on paradigm and access management. In a simple scenario, the user authenticates using credentials like a username and password, the result of a successful authentication is the creation of a sessionId or session token for the user. This token is stored as a cookie or passed along with URL as parameters. Below is an example of an authentication request/response using SOAP showing the entire process:
 Figure 11. An Authentication Request/Response Using SOAP
The Session Token becomes the basis for exchanging proof of authentication. For example, to request authorization for the resource you intend to protect via TestPolicy, the client needs to furnish the proof of authentication as a part of authorization request. The following example of a request/response using SOAP shows the authorization process:
 Figure 12. A Request/Response Using SOAP
And finally, the following example shows the operation related to user attributes or profile attributes in a given session token.
 Figure 13. The Operation in a Given Session Token
Conclusion
This article covered the basic facilities provided by OpenSSO pertaining to identity management and access management. More information is available from the following links:
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Ron Gates for proofreading this article.
Thribhuvan Thakur is a senior software engineer and Technical Lead at Southwest Airlines with 12 years of experience in design and development in J2EE. He has been working with Java since its inception, and with JMS since 1999. Thakur is a Sun Certified Java Programmer, Sun Certified Java Developer, and Sun Certified J2EE Architect. He holds a Masters in Computer Science from the University of North Texas.
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