SecContextFactory class

This class exposes factory methods that other Sybase products can use for programmatic security.

Syntax

public class SecContextFactory

Remarks

In the lexicon of security, those products are implementing Policy Enforcement Points (PEPs). The purpose of this package is to provide a pluggable and stackable way to propagate these PEP invocations to the appropriate Policy Decision Points (PDPs) based on a customer's configuration of the security aspects of their installation.

The typical consumer of CSI will perform some or all of the following steps in the following order to retrieve a CSI security context object:

  1. Call static SecContextFactory.newInstance() to retrieve a factory instance
  2. Optionally call setConfiguration and/or setCallbackHandler methods to alter default Context creation behavior
  3. Call SecContextFactory object's getContext() method to retrieve the security context.

As part of context creation, a configuration must always be established. If the setConfiguration method is called with a non-null value, then the object specified will be used when determining configuration of the security context. Otherwise, the global configuration mechanism is used. The global configuration mechanism entails retrieving the appropriate configuration object using the "com.sybase.security.ConfigurationProvider" system property. This property must either be unspecified or must specify the classname of a class that implements the com.sybase.security.SecConfiguration interface. If it is unspecified then the JVM is inspected to retrieve the configuration provider service. If one cannot be found then the com.sybase.security.core.PropertiesConfiguration class is used for configuration.