Chapter 9. Permission-based Security and Administration

Security is an essential requirement for residential gateway applications. Security also involves many different aspects. In this chapter we focus on granting and enforcing permissions to bundles using the policy-based fine-grained access control mechanisms of the Java 2 platform.

We begin by refreshing our memory on how permission-based security works in the Java 2 Runtime Environment. We then examine the new permissions defined by the OSGi Service Gateway Specification 1.0. Lastly we outline the steps to run the Java Embedded Server software with security enabled, and discuss how to use permissions in your own services with examples.

Because administration is considered a privileged operation and therefore requires an administrative permission to be carried out, we discuss how to perform common administrative tasks in this chapter as well.