IBM CSM to IBM Systems Director Transformation Guide

96 IBM CSM to IBM Systems Director Transformation Guide

crucial to understand and control the data that is sent around in your network. If the data you

transmit is sensitive and not encrypted, consider isolating that data on a dedicated network.

Security policies and controls must be in place to ensure proper control of hardware

commands, such as remote console or remote power, is authenticated and authorized, as

well as user profiles and grouping, and access lists.

This purpose of this section is to highlight some of the security differences between CSM and

Systems Director. However, it is not within the scope of this section to document all the

differences between the two products because IBM Systems Director is so much more than

just a management tool that CSM was considered to be. Since the security differences are

mainly found in the authentication and authorization process, we primarily focus on these:

򐂰 Authentication and authorization

򐂰 Communication topology

򐂰 Roles and responsibilities

򐂰 Users and groups

4.4.1 Authentication and Authorization when using CSM

CSM uses the security functions of RSCT to ensure that the software components in your

cluster can properly interact and authenticate the identity of clients, peers, or RSCT

subcomponents, This determination is made in such a way that the cluster software

component can be certain that the identity is genuine and not forged by some party trying to

gain unwarranted access to the system.

Authentication

Authentication allows CSM to send and receive message keys (Message Authentication).

Each key is signed by the sender and the signature is verified by the receiver. The information

needed to verify the signature of the message is contained in a key and the authentication is

done by key exchange,also known as credentials-based authentication.

Be aware that authentication differs from authorization.

Authorization

Authorization used in CSM uses an access control list-based authorization that provides

access control to resource classes. The ACL is kept in a stanza format which is used to verify

whenever a given host has the permissions to access the resource class or instance for the

class named by the stanza. RMC is the only RSCT component that implements authorization.

CSM uses the security provided by the operating system. It does not come with any security

hardening software nor any agent-based encryption protocols, which leaves room to ensure

some of the more generic security concerns, especially since CSM utilizes the distributed

shell (dsh) or remote shell command. It is therefore the system administrator’s responsibility to

fulfill any security obligations that this environment may require, beause CSM does not

provide any specific security configuration.

Kerberos:

Kerberos is considered one of the few leftovers from the PSSP transition paths because

in the early days of PSSP neither the RSCT stack nor AIX provided any robust security

authentication stack. Kerberos was therefore needed to enforce and strengthen the

security within the management domain clustering environment. CSM did include its

own security layer (CtSec) that could be used out of the box, but based on the transition

path you might or might not have used it. In this book we do not cover Kerberos

authentication and authorization to Systems Director.