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Security architecture and controls

The following illustration shows the Remedy security architecture:

security_architecture.png

When planning an enterprise setup, consult the following topics for security guidelines:

Remedy AR System security

Security is an important consideration for AR System. The AR System server addresses security through the following controls: 

Remedy Mid tier security

Remedy ITSM Suite provides a secure environment by encrypting sensitive data. You will need the AR user based authentication for logging into the Mid Tier configuration pages. Other passwords are stored in configuration files as encrypted strings. For the web server, you must add any additional security if required.

SSL, XSS and WebDAV are common encryption methods for Remedy AR System server, Remedy Mid Tier, Remedy Smart Reporting, Remedy with Smart IT and Atrium Web Services.

Best practice
We recommend that you use a secure socket layer (SSL) or HTTPS connection to encrypt the data between the web server and the browser client.

Enabling SSL can impact performance due to the extra overhead required to encrypt and decrypt on both ends.

Note

You can log on to Remedy Mid Tier using only HTTP POST requests.

Use Remedy Encryption Performance Security or Remedy Encryption Premium Security to encrypt communication between AR System components, including the Mid Tier.

When securing the mid tier, consider these tips about:

SSL

  • The mid tier works with SSL. SSL encryption is a few layers below the web application (between the HTTP web server and the browser client sending the HTTP requests). All web server vendors provide a method to create and store certificates to enable SSL encryption over HTTP.
  • Configuring the environment for SSL support is beyond the scope of any guidance BMC provides.

XSS

Cross-site scripting (XSS) is a type of computer security vulnerability (typically found in web application) that allows code injection by malicious web users into the web pages viewed by other users. Examples of such code include HTML code and client-side scripts.

Cross-site scripting is addressed in every release of the mid tier by running the code through a tool to identify potential problems to ensure no vulnerability is introduced. All user-supplied HTML special characters are encoded into character entities, thereby preventing them from being interpreted as HTML.

WebDAV

Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) extensions on web servers allow users to collaboratively edit and manage files on remote web servers. If your web servers has the WebDAV extensions enabled by default, they should be disabled.

HTTP transport

To ensure that the HTTP transport method POST is used for XML/HTTP requests in the browser, you must set the arsystem.xmlhttp.get flag in the Config.properties file to false.

For more information, see:

Warning

If you use the pwd parameter in a URL, passwords are exposed by the browser in the locator and in bookmarks or favorites. For URLs that include the pwd parameter, use https:// (https://*).

Content-Security-Policy (CSP) header

The Content-Security-Policy (CSP) header prevents the browser from ClickJacking Attacks. This header controls;

  • Whether your web-page can be loaded in < iframe >, < frame >, < object >, < embed >, or < applet > tags.
  • On what domains the web page is loaded.

You can enable the Content-Security-Policy (CSP) header by using the arsystem.security_iframe_allowfromurls parameter in Centralized Configuration.
For more information, see arsystem.security_iframe_allowfromurls parameter.

You can also use the web.xml file located in the <MidTierInstallDir>/WEB-INF folder to enable the Content-Security-Policy (CSP) header. The Centralized Configuration setting overrides the settings in the  web.xml file. For information about enabling the Content-Security-Policy (CSP) header using the web.xml file, see Enabling-cross-launch-to-mid-tier.

Approval server security

The approval server provides a secure environment by encrypting sensitive data. For example, the password is always encoded and never saved in any file as readable text. You can add any additional security if required.

Use Remedy Encryption Performance Security or Remedy Encryption Premium Security to encrypt communication between AR System components, including the Approval server. Approval server uses the encrypted password for the Remedy Application Service user, which is available in the Centralized Configuration for making any backend calls to AR System.

BMC CMDB security

The CMDB Class Manager controls permission to access CMDB classes and attributes. This is done by using Role IDs associated with Role definitions from the BMC:Atrium CMDB deployable application. Two roles (-1090 and -1091) are defined to allow unlimited read or read/write access to CMDB data. Two other roles (-1098 and -1099) allow read or read/write access subject to row-level permission. The CMDB administrator should assign these roles to the appropriate groups in production and test environments.

Email Engine and Assignment Engine security

For information on Email Engine security, see Securing-incoming-and-outgoing-email.

For information on Assignment Engine security, see Configuring-the-Assignment-Engine-server-settings.

Remedy Single Sign-On security

For information on Remedy Single Sign-On security, see Security planning in the Remedy SSO online documentation.

Additional Information

For more information on security guidelines, see the blog Choose your request methods carefully shared on BMC Communities.

 

 

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