Security considerations for HCL® Quality Server

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® Quality Server, 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 HCL® Quality Server. If you already have access to an Active Directory or LDAP environment, verify the access to HCL® Quality Server 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 HCL® Quality Server.

HCL® Quality Server 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

HCL® Quality Server does not support single sign-on.

Ports, protocols, and services

Port 7883 is used for the Topology Discovery view. HCL OneTest™ API creates a TCP connection to the HCL® Quality Server 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 HCL® Quality Server on Microsoft™ Windows™ systems, by default, Windows™ services are configured to run HCL® Quality Server 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 HCL® Quality Server are by default HTTPS on port 5443 (see Network ports). 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 HCL OneTest™ API project, the HCL® Quality Server 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 HCL® Quality Server:
  • 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 HCL® Quality Server 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.
  • HCL® Quality Server supports domain level security. Only HCL® Quality Server 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 HCL® Quality Server, users are either normal users or system administrators. When installing HCL® Quality Server, 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 HCL® Quality Server 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: HCL® Quality Server can be used as an authentication provider for HCL OneTest™ API project authentication, allowing users to use the same credentials when you log in to a project as when you log in to HCL® Quality Server. For more information about how to configure LDAP, see Modifying Rational Test Control Panel security model settings after installation

Domain level security and tokens

Domain-level security can be enabled to grant HCL® Quality Server users access to specific domains and define the level of that access. Domain administrators can assign HCL® Quality Server 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 HCL® Quality Server, 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 HCL® Quality Server 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 HCL OneTest™ API 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.