Security considerations for DevOps Test Virtualization Control Panel

You must ensure that your installation is secure, customize your security settings, and set up user access controls. Also, you must know about any security limitations that you might encounter with this server application.

Enabling security during installation

When installing HCL DevOps Test Virtualization Control Panel (Test Virtualization Control Panel), you have the following options:
  • Select from a variety of user authentication options, including a default built-in option, an Active Directory option, a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) option, or no authentication (see Managing users.) For Active Directory or LDAP, authentication is through a user name and a password specified during the installation of Test Virtualization Control Panel. If you already have access to an Active Directory or LDAP environment, verify the access to Test Virtualization Control Panel by logging into the environment and checking whether you can see the pages. This verification process can be extended to see whether you have standard or administrator privileges in Test Virtualization Control Panel.

Test Virtualization Control Panel includes an HTTP/TCP proxy, with SSL and a custom key pair/certificate for the HTTPS proxy. You can replace the certificate by updating the existing keystore that is referenced in the configuration file of the proxy or by using a new one. See Modifying the configuration settings of the HTTP/TCP proxy.

Enabling secure communication between multiple applications

Test Virtualization Control Panel does not support single sign-on.

Ports, protocols, and services

Port 7883 is used for the Topology Discovery view. Test Integrations and APIs creates a TCP connection to the Test Virtualization Control Panel on this port and periodically receives information about the resources that are observed by the proxies and intercepts.

When you use IBM® Installation Manager to install Test Virtualization Control Panel on Microsoft™ Windows™ systems, by default, Windows™ services are configured to run Test Virtualization Control Panel and the HTTP/TCP proxy at startup but you can change this setting during installation. These services are executed using the Local System account. After the installation, use Windows™ Service Control Manager to modify or disable the services.

All communications with Test Virtualization Control Panel are by default HTTPS on port 5443 (see Network ports used by DevOps Test Integrations and APIs). You can change the port number after installation and also enable plain HTTP. For details, see Configuring the server HTTP Endpoint. The first time you create an Test Integrations and APIs project, the Test Virtualization Control Panel URL defaults to https://localhost:5443/RTCP and the port value that you use for the creation of a project becomes the default value for all the new projects.

Customizing your security settings

Consider the following security options in Test Virtualization Control Panel:
  • Customization of pages is not supported.
  • No forms of notifications are supported.
  • All successful and unsuccessful login attempts are stored in an audit log, which Test Virtualization Control Panel administrators can view on the Administration page.
  • If the built-in user-authentication option is enabled, passwords are hashed and stored in a way that is similar to the security on Unix-like systems, and there is no way to change this setting. See Managing users.
  • Test Virtualization Control Panel supports domain level security. Only Test Virtualization Control Panel system administrators can enable and disable domain level security. See Enabling and disabling domain-level security.
  • The server by default provides a truststore. You can configure the server to use a custom truststore for server SSL connections. For details, see Using your own truststore for server SSL connections.

Setting up user roles and access

In Test Virtualization Control Panel, users are either normal users or system administrators. When installing Test Virtualization Control Panel, you can choose either of these two user authentication methods to configure server security:
  • The built-in security option, where the default administrator user that is created during installation uses the Administration page in Test Virtualization Control Panel to create additional users, and there are no rules for passwords.
  • The Active Directory option or the LDAP option, where you map the groups to the system administrator or normal user type.
Note: Test Virtualization Control Panel can be used as an authentication provider for Test Integrations and APIs project authentication, allowing users to use the same credentials when you log in to a project as when you log in to Test Virtualization Control Panel. For more information about how to configure LDAP, see Modifying security model settings after installation of DevOps Test Virtualization Control Panel

Domain level security and tokens

Domain-level security can be enabled to grant Test Virtualization Control Panel users access to specific domains and define the level of that access. Domain administrators can assign Test Virtualization Control Panel system administrators and normal users to any of the following roles:
  • Domain administrator
  • Domain user
  • Domain API user

When the domain level security is enabled, the agents and proxies must be configured to enable registering with the domain. The access to the secured domain for the agents and proxies can be implemented by using security tokens.

In Test Virtualization Control Panel, the security token is generated for a user. The generated security token is then specified in the registration.xml file (for proxy) and Agent.config file (for agent) to enable access to the secured domain.

Security limitations

The built-in security of Test Virtualization Control Panel is used to store the user names and passwords as hashes in a file for user authentication. Passwords for further remote access, for example, when configuring access to an Test Integrations and APIs project results database, are stored in an obfuscated form. See Configuring the project results database.

When domain level security is enabled, the REST API can be accessed only with a valid security key. See Enabling and disabling domain-level security.