Find out about the new enhancements IBM has delivered in recent releases.
Editor's Note: This article introduces the webcast "Top Ten New Features of IBM i Security" available free to view at the MC Webcast Center.
The team at IBM has been busy integrating new and enhanced IBM i security features. Here are the highlights from V6R1, V7R1, and the Technology Refreshes since.
V6R1 brought many new system values, including QPWDRULES (password rules). This system value provides you with the ability to apply the same password rules as you do for your network. It consolidates the rules into one system value, rather than a system value per rule, and provides significantly more granularity and options than the previous set of system values. A new feature of the system value QLMTDEVSSN (limit device sessions) turns a system value that was unusable for many organizations into a very useful control point. The old values for QLMTDEVSSN allowed a user to either have one session connected to the IBM i or an unlimited number of sessions. Because most users require at least two sessions, organizations were forced into setting this value to 0 (unlimited.) With V6R1, you can specify between 1 and 9 devices. And, of course, you can override the system value with the corresponding Limit Device Sessions parameter in the user profile. With these two updates, this feature is once again useable for most organizations.
V7R1 provided the addition of two new parameters to the Create and Change User Profile (CRT/CHGUSRPRF) commands. These new parameters allow you to specify when the profile will expire—that is, be set to a status of *DISABLED. You can specify either a timeframe, such as 90 days, or a specific date. This is great security administration aid for user profile management. When you create temporary profiles (such as those for seasonal employees), you can be assured that the system will automatically disable them without your taking action.
The Technology Refreshes since V7 have provided my favorite enhancements and, in my opinion, the most powerful enhancements. Under the category of "powerful" is the FIELDPROC support. Think of this as an exit program on a database column. Using this exit, you can perform encryption/decryption routines, allowing you to take the actual encryption as well as the logic of who gets to see the decrypted information out of the programs doing the reads and writes to the database files. Hopefully, this will lead to more organizations encrypting data since they don't have to integrate the support into their application programs.
My favorite enhancement—well, one of my favorite enhancements—is the feature added to Application Administration (a feature of iNavigator) that provides the ability to control who can use DDM/DRDA and ODBC. This feature provides only a sliver of the functionality of the security vendor products such as Cilasoft's CONTROLER product. But the audit journal entries created by this function provide visibility into who's using these interfaces. Sometimes you need this visibility to convince management that users really are accessing your systems using these interfaces so you can do something about it …or to prove to yourself that they aren't. Also, if you're simply trying to shut off access for most yet allow it for a few, this function provides that support.
Listen to the webcast as Carol Woodbury discusses in detail these features along with the other Top Ten New Features of IBM i Security.
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