Web Agents 2023.11.1

Continuous security

When a user requests a resource through AM, excluding proxies and load balancers, the Web Agent is usually the first point of contact. Because Web Agent is closer to the user than AM, and outside the firewalls that separate the user and AM, the Web Agent can sometimes gather information about the request, which AM cannot access.

When Web Agent requests a policy decision from AM, it can include the additional information in an environment map, a set of name/value pairs that describe the request IP and DNS name, along with other, optional, information. The additional information can then be included in the policy, for example, to allow only incoming requests that contain the InternalNetwork.

In AM, use server-side authorization scripts to access the environment map, and write scripted conditions based on cookies and headers in the request. For information about server-side authorization scripts, refer to Scripting a policy condition in AM’s Authorization guide.

Environment maps with customizable keys

In Web Agent, use the continuous security properties Continuous Security Cookie Map and Continuous Security Header Map to configure an environment map with the following parts:

requestIp

The IP address of the inbound request, determined as follows:

  • If Client IP Address Header is configured, Web Agent extracts the IP address from the header.

  • Otherwise, Web Agent uses the web server connection information to determine the client IP address.

This entry is always created in the map.

requestDNSName

The host name address of the inbound request, determined as follows:

  • If Client Hostname Header is configured, Web Agent extracts the host name from the header.

  • Otherwise, Web Agent uses the web server connection information to determine the client’s host name.

This entry is always created in the map.

Other variable names

An array of cookie or header values. An entry is created for each value specified in the continuous security properties.

In the following example, the continuous security properties are configured to map values for the ssid cookie and User-Agent header to fields in an environment map:

org.forgerock.openam.agents.config.continuous.security.cookies[ssid]=mySsid
org.forgerock.openam.agents.config.continuous.security.headers[User-Agent]=myUser-Agent

If the incoming request contains an ssid cookie and a User-Agent header, the environment map takes the value of the cookie and header, as shown in this example:

requestIp=192.16.8.0.1
requestDnsName=client.example.com
mySsid=77xe99f4zqi1l99z
myUser-Agent=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko