Best practices to secure the Siebel adapter

This section provides best practices that you should follow to more completely protect sensitive data when you use or develop applications that consume the Microsoft BizTalk Adapter for Siebel eBusiness Applications.

Security Best Practices for the Connection between the Siebel Adapter and the Siebel System

  • The Siebel adapter supports mscrypto or rsa encryption on the data exchanged between the adapter and the Siebel system. To help ensure the privacy of the data that is exchanged between the adapter and the Siebel system, you should enable one of these encryption modes.

  • The Siebel adapter does not provide mechanisms to help ensure data integrity or to provide for authentication and authorization on the data that is exchanged between it and the Siebel system. You must provide such mechanisms, if these concerns exist in your environment.

  • Do not provide user name password credentials for the Siebel system in the connection URI. See the remainder of this topic for alternative methods of providing credentials to the Siebel adapter.

    For more information, see Security between Siebel and the adapter

Security Best Practices for Consuming the Siebel Adapter with BizTalk Server

  • Do not provide user name password credentials for the Siebel system in the connection URI.

  • When you use the Consume Adapter Service Add-in, enter the user name password credentials for the Siebel system from the Security tab of the Configure Adapter dialog box.

  • When you configure the BizTalk WCF-Custom adapter for the Siebel adapter on a send port, enter the user name password credentials for the Siebel system from the Credentials tab of the Configure WCF Custom Transport dialog box.

  • When you configure the BizTalk WCF-Custom adapter for the Siebel adapter on a receive location, enter the user name password credentials for the Siebel system from the Other tab of the Configure WCF Custom Transport dialog box.

    For more information, see Security with Siebel adapter and BizTalk Server

Security Best Practices for Consuming the Siebel Adapter with Programming Solutions

  • It is sometimes necessary to provide the user name password credentials for the Siebel system in the connection URI; however, if possible, you should avoid doing this.

  • When you use the Add Adapter Service Reference Visual Studio Plug-in, enter the user name password credentials for the Siebel system from the Security tab of the Configure Adapter dialog box.

  • In WCF Channel Model programming, use the Credentials property on the channel factory to set the user name password credentials for the Siebel system.

  • In WCF Service Model programming, use the ClientCredentials property on the WCF client to set the user name password credentials for the Siebel system.

  • If an application that consumes the Siebel adapter sends messages that contain sensitive database information across a process boundary to another service or client, ensure that these messages have sufficient security measures applied to provide adequate data protection in your environment.

    For more information see, Secure programming with the Siebel adapter

Security Best Practices for Hosting the Siebel Adapter in IIS

  • Hosting the Siebel adapter in Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) as a Web service exposes operations surfaced by the Siebel adapter to Web clients. These operations might involve exchanging sensitive data over the Internet, so you should take measures to help ensure that this data is as secure as possible.

    WCF provides two standard bindings for HTTP transport: the BasicHttpBinding provides basic HTTP transport with no security mechanisms; the WSHttpBinding supports both transport-level and message-level security mechanisms.

    You can either use the BasicHttpBinding over an HTTPS connection, or use the WSHttpBinding to help protect your data. The WCF LOB Adapter SDK includes the WCF LOB Adapter Service Development Wizard to generate WCF services for LOB artifacts. This wizard only supports use of BasicHttpBinding.

    You can also develop a custom HTTP binding to leverage additional security mechanisms that your environment provides. For more information about the security features that WCF provides, see Securing Services and Clients.

Security Best Practices for WCF Diagnostic Tracing and Message Logging

WCF supports diagnostic tracing and message logging. You configure diagnostic tracing and message logging either through configuration files or by using Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). Depending on the configuration options you set, WCF diagnostic tracing or message logging can emit sensitive information to log files, where it could potentially be exposed to observation by unauthorized users.

Follow the recommendations provided in the WCF documentation to mitigate potential security threats exposed by enabling these features. At a minimum, you should observe the following best practices for diagnostic tracing and message logging:

  • Do not enable “verbose” or “information” tracing in a production environment. This may lead to performance degradation. However, you must enable “warning” and “error” tracing in a production environment. If you enable tracing, you must take proper security measures to protect your data. See the WCF documentation for more information.

  • Ensure that log files and configuration files are protected by access control lists (ACLs).

    The following warnings apply specifically to the messages that are exchanged between a client application and the Siebel adapter:

  • WCF diagnostic tracing can log the header (but not the body) of messages exchanged with the Siebel adapter. Because the message action is in the message header, this reveals the operations invoked on the Siebel adapter by the client.

  • If WCF message logging is enabled and logMessagesAtServiceLevel is true, the message header (but not the message body) of messages exchanged between the adapter client and the Siebel adapter are logged. Because the message action is in the message header, this reveals the operations that the client invoked on the Siebel adapter. If logEntireMessage is also true, the message body will be logged. This can reveal sensitive database information.

    For more information about improving security when you enable diagnostic tracing, see Security Concerns and Useful Tips for Tracing. For more information about improving security when you enable message logging, see Security Concerns for Message Logging.

See Also

Secure your Siebel applications