Security planning

This section describes the following security requirements for the Remedy Single Sign-On application:

Ensuring security for sensitive data

User credentials and authentication tokens are sensitive data that must be secured. To secure this data, you must configure HTTPS.

To use HTTPS connections, ensure that SSL certificates are generated, signed, and imported on the Tomcat server (for standalone mode) or load balancer (for high availability mode).

HTTPS configuration on a standalone system

For standalone installations, HTTPS has to be configured on the Tomcat server in the server.xml file. After the configuration, the interactions between the user and Remedy SSO node happens through HTTPS only. The interactions between the supported BMC application and Remedy SSO node happen through either HTTP or HTTPS, depending on the relevant configuration.

HTTP configuration on a high availability system

For high availability installations, HTTPS has to be configured on the load balancer. After the configuration, while the interactions between the user and the load balancer happen through HTTPS connections, the interactions between the load balancer and the Remedy SSO nodes and the supported BMC applications happens through HTTP only.

Decrypting SAML assertions

To encrypt SAML assertions, the identity provider uses one of the following methods: aes-128, aes-192, aes-256.

If aes-192 or aes-252 have been used, you need to perform the following step to enable Remedy SSO to decrypt the SAML assertions:

Update %JRE_HOME%->lib->security by downloading files from the http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html link and following the instructions in the JRE Readme.

Configuring Tomcat security headers

Though content transmitted over an SSL/TLS channel guarantees confidentiality, Remedy SSO administrators must ensure that caching of sensitive content is disabled unless the caching is absolutely needed.

To ensure that sensitive content is protected, BMC recommends that you configure the following headers in Tomcat:

X-XSS-Protection—Set the value as 1, which means Enabled, on all outgoing requests.
X-Content-Type-Options header—Set the value as nosniff on all outgoing requests.

Obtaining Remedy SSO server version information

You can obtain the Remedy SSO server version information through the <RSSO Server>/config/server-status URL. You must be authenticated as a Remedy SSO administrator.

Support for multiple administrator accounts in Remedy SSO

For security reasons, in the Admin User tab, the Remedy SSO administrator can create and manage multiple administrator accounts. The Remedy SSO administrator can block, unblock, delete the administrator account they created, or change its password. For more information about creating and managing multiple administrator accounts, see Setting up Remedy SSO administrator accounts.

Remedy SSO administration lockout policy

For security reasons, to make sure that there are no unauthorized logins, administrators who exceed the number of login attempts due to the incorrect password are blocked automatically. Additionally, you can also unblock the locked administrators manually through the Admin User Management tab on the Remedy SSO Admin Console. For more information, see Configuring the Remedy SSO server.

The administrator lockout policy is applicable to internal administrators only.

Remedy SSO end users lockout policy

Remedy SSO depends on the external identity providers to authenticate end users. To make sure that there are no unauthorized logins, end users who exceed the number of failed login attempts due to the incorrect password should be blocked by the identity provider.

Enabling signed SAML metadata for security

To ensure that the security policies of your organization are followed, you can now sign the SAML metadata. For this, a new Sign Metadata field is added on the Remedy SSO Admin Console. When the SAML realm is configured for signing metadata, the Remedy SSO server gets the certificate and private key from keystore's alias and signs the metadata with it.

For more information on enabling the signing metadata, see Configuring Remedy SSO to authenticate users with SAMLv2.

Ensuring more secured and restricted access to the cookie

The domain attribute of the cookie determines which domains can access the cookie. While installing the Remedy SSO server, by default, the value of the cookie is set to the parent domain. Because of this, the parent domain and its sub-domains can access the cookie, and if the cookie carries any sensitive data, then that data is accessible to all the less trusted or less secure applications hosted on these domains. You can set the cookie domain value to the domain on which the Remedy SSO server is installed, and not restrict it to the parent domain. This ensures that the cookie is not accessible to any less trusted applications.

You can set the cookie domain value either during installation, or after installation in the Remedy SSO Admin Console. For more information, see Configuring the Remedy SSO server.

Remedy SSO operation with specific database features

Remedy SSO does not depend on any external vendor-specific solutions such as multi-subnet failover environment for MSSQL, Oracle RAC, various security extensions such as data encryption techniques from database vendors. The vendor-specific solutions also include procedures for disaster recovery, backup, archiving, import and export of data.
As a Remedy SSO administrator, you can manually configure the settings by using the JDBC connection string in the context.xml file or by using your database. Even though Remedy SSO is not specifically certified with certain database settings and configurations that the database vendors provide, the product should work with these settings. For any issues related to a supported database or environment, contact BMC Customer Support.