1. Developing SOA Applications with Oracle SOA Suite
  2. Completing Your Application
  3. Enabling Security with Policies and Message Encryption
  4. Introduction to Policies

Introduction to Policies

Oracle Fusion Middleware uses a policy-based model to manage and secure Web services across an organization. Policies apply security to the delivery of messages. Policies can be managed by both developers in a design-time environment and system administrators in a runtime environment.

Policies are comprised of one or more assertions. A policy assertion is the smallest unit of a policy that performs a specific action. Policy assertions are executed on the request message and the response message, and the same set of assertions is executed on both types of messages. The assertions are executed in the order in which they appear in the policy.

Table 47-1 describes the supported policy categories.

Table 47-1 Supported Policy Categories

Category Description

Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM)

Ensures that attachments are in MTOM format. This format enables binary data to be sent to and from web services. This reduces the transmission size on the wire.

Reliability

Supports the WS-Reliable Messaging protocol. This guarantees the end-to-end delivery of messages.

Addressing

Verifies that simple object access protocol (SOAP) messages include WS-Addressing headers in conformance with the WS-Addressing specification. Transport-level data is included in the XML message rather than relying on the network-level transport to convey this information.

Security

Implements the WS-Security 1.0 and 1.1 standards. They enforce authentication and authorization of users. identity propagation, and message protection (message integrity and message confidentiality).

Management

Logs request, response, and fault messages to a message log. Management policies can also include custom policies.

Within each category there are one or more policy types that you can attach. For example, if you select the reliability category, the following types are available for selection:

  • oracle/no_reliable_messaging_policy

    Supports the disabling of reliable messaging configured at a higher scope

  • oracle/no_wsrm_policy

    Supports the disabling of a globally attached Web Services Reliable Messaging policy

  • oracle/reliable_messaging_policy

    Supports the enabling of Web services reliable messaging

  • oracle/wsrm10_policy

    Supports version 1.0 of the Web Services Reliable Messaging protocol

  • oracle/wsrm11_policy

    Supports version 1.1 of the Web Services Reliable Messaging protocol

For more information about available policies, details about which ones to use in your environment, and global policies, see Securing Web Services and Managing Policies with Oracle Web Services Manager.