Chapter 8. Securing JMX

Security is a central requirement for modern networked systems. This requirement applies to the components of systems that provide essential business function and to the infrastructure and applications that monitor and manage those components . Unfortunately, security is often one of the last things considered during design and one of the first things compromised in implementation. Version 1.0 of the JMX specification followed in this unfortunate tradition by not addressing obvious security concerns; in fairness to the developers of that specification, they expected JMX to be used in an environment where a management system ”for example, Tivoli's TME, or BMC's PATROL ”controlled, and secured, access to the MBeanServer. Version 1.1 began to address this issue by defining a new permission to control access to MBeanServerFactory . Extending that work to address other JMX security issues is high on the priority list of the Java Community Process (JCP) Expert Group working on version 1.2 of the specification.

In this chapter we will examine the JMX 1.1 security model and some proposed extensions implemented in the MX4J open -source JMX project. Although what emerges in the specifications may not be identical to what is in MX4J, at the time of this writing the MX4J implementation provides the best starting point for exploring JMX security issues.