Chapter 8. Security Services on Bluemix

In this chapter, we will look at what security services are available on Bluemix and how we can use them to secure our application on Bluemix. Securing your web applications and your cloud environment is a very important aspect of developing applications on cloud. In this chapter, you will learn about the security services provided on Bluemix and how you can configure one of the security services to provide an authentication service to your web application.

Note

Discussions in this chapter will be based upon the capabilities that are available on Bluemix at the time of writing this book.

In this chapter, you will learn about the following topics:

• Overview of security services in Bluemix

• Access Trail security service

  • Creating the Access Trail service instance

  • Working with the Access Trail service

• Single Sign On security service

  • Creating the Single Sign On service instance

  • Configuring the identity sources in Single Sign On

  • Configuring the Cloud Directory

  • Configuring...

Overview of the security services in the Bluemix catalog

Services under the Security category in the Bluemix catalog are as follows:

• Access Trail, which is an IBM service, in beta at the time of writing this book

• Application Security on Cloud is an IBM-provided service

• Single Sign On is an IBM-provided service

• Adaptive Security Manager (ASM) is a third-party service

When you log in to Bluemix and select the Security category, you will see the security services created in your account:

From here you can create a new security service instance by clicking the Get started now! icon in the top-right corner, as shown in following screenshot:

Clicking the Get started now! icon, will display the security services available on Bluemix. At the time of writing this book, the available security services are as shown in the following screenshot:

Let us now look at some of these security services, what they offer as security functions, and how they can be used with your application on Bluemix.

Access Trail security service

Access Trail is an IBM service that allows you to monitor security within an IBM Cloud environment.

Note

This service is in beta at the time of writing this book.

Access Trail uses API call monitoring as the mechanism to monitor the IBM Cloud. When using the Access Trail service, all API calls in the IBM Cloud are monitored and any suspicious or unusual API activity is detected. Remedial measures to prevent the security breaches are carried out by preventing the specific API activity in the IBM Cloud environment. The Access Trail service captures API call logs, which is later used for filtering and monitoring the API call activity in the IBM Cloud. All APIs from IBM Cloud runtimes, services, applications, and user activity are logged.

Note

You can read the blog at https://ibm.biz/BdrFDt for more information on Access Trail.

Creating the Access Trail service instance

In this section, we will learn how to create the Access Trail service instance and how to configure...

Single Sign On security service

In this section, we will learn about another useful security service on Bluemix, called Single Sign On. We will learn to create the service instance, configure it, and integrate it with your web application on Bluemix.

Creating a Single Sign On service instance

Let's see how to create a Single Sign On service instance:

1. Log in to your Bluemix account.

2. Click the Security Category and from the Security Services dashboard, click Get started now!:

   

3. From the list of security services, select Single Sign On, as shown in the following screenshot:

   

4. Click Create after reviewing the information shown on the screen, as shown in the following screenshot:

   

5. Once the service instance is created, you will see the screen shown in the following screenshot, where you will be prompted to enter a name for your service, which will be part of your service URL:

   

6. Click Continue.

7. You will see a screen where you can configure an identity provider that you can use to authenticate users to...

Summary

In this chapter, we discussed the security services available in Bluemix and we delved deeper into using two of the available security services in Bluemix. We learned how to offload your web application authentication functionality to the Single Sign On service in Bluemix. We also learned how to configure different kinds of identity sources in Single Sign On, and saw how they can be integrated to work with your application running on Bluemix.

In the next chapter, we will learn about microservice architecture and why Bluemix is a great platform for building applications that use microservice architecture.