# Global Configuration

## Contents
Overview Enterprise Gateway Configuration Options Web Services Repository Processes Policies Certificates Enterprise Gateway User Store System Alerts External Connections Schema Cache Black list and White list Caches

## Overview
For convenience, the Policy Studio contains various global configuration options. For example, it includes libraries of users, X.509 certificates, and schemas that can be added globally and then referenced in filters and policies. This avoids the need to reconfigure details over and over again (for example, each time a schema or certificate is used). The following global libraries are available in the Policy Studio, each of which are discussed briefly in the sections below: Enterprise Gateway Configuration Options Web Services Repository Processes Policies Certificates Enterprise Gateway Users Alerts External Connections Schema Cache Black list White list Caches
## Enterprise Gateway Configuration Options
You can configure the underlying configuration settings for the Enterprise Gateway using the Policy Studio Settings menu option. This includes the following options: Deploy Default Settings Logging Settings Namespace Settings MIME/DIME Settings Change Passphrase For more information, see the Enterprise Gateway Configuration Options topic.
## Web Services Repository
The easiest way to secure a Web Service with the Enterprise Gateway is to import the WSDL (Web Services Description Language) file for the service using the Policy Studio. This creates a Service Handler for the Web Service, which is used to control and validate requests to the Web Service and responses from the Web Service. The WSDL file is also added to the Web Services Repository, making sure to update the URL of the Web Service to point at the machine on which the Enterprise Gateway is running instead of that on which the Web Service is running. Consumers of the Web Service can then query the Enterprise Gateway for the WSDL file for the Web Service. The consumer then knows to route messages to the Enterprise Gateway instead of attempting to route directly to the Web Service, which most likely will not be available on a public IP address. The Web Services Repository offers administrators a very simple way of securing a Web Service with minimal impact on consumers of that service. Because of this, the Web Services Repository should be used as the primary method of setting up policies within the Policy Studio. For more information on using the Repository to setup policies, see the Web Services Repository tutorial.
## Processes
A Process represents a single running instance of the Enterprise Gateway. It enables you to configure at least two interfaces: one for public traffic, and a second for listening for and serving configuration data. The configuration interface should rarely need to be updated. However, it is likely that you will want to add several HTTP interfaces. For example, you may want to add an HTTP interface and an SSL-enabled HTTPS interface. Furthermore, you can also add features such as the following at the Process level: SMTP interfaces to configure email relay Policy execution schedulers to run policies at regular time intervals JMS listeners to listen for JMS messages Packet sniffers to inspect packets at the network level for logging and monitoring Directory scanners to scan messages dumped to the file system Because the Enterprise Gateway can read messages from HTTP, SMTP, JMS, or a directory, this enables it to perform protocol translation. For example, the Enterprise Gateway can read a message from a JMS queue, and then route it on over HTTP to a Web Service. Similarly, the Enterprise Gateway can read XML messages that have been FTP-ed to a directory on the file system and send them to a JMS messaging system or route them over HTTP to a back-end system. For more information on configuring processes, see the Processes tutorial.
## Policies
A policy is made up of a sequence of modular, reusable message filters, each of which processes the message in a particular way. There are many categories of filters available, including authentication, authorization, content filtering, routing, and many more. For example, a typical policy might contain an authentication filter, followed by several content-based filters (for example, Schema Validation, Threatening Content, Message Size, XML Complexity, and so on), and provided all configured filters run successfully, the message is routed on to the configured destination. A policy can be thought of as a network of message filters. A message can traverse different paths through the network depending on what filters succeed or fail. This enables you to configure policies that, for example, route messages that pass one Schema Validation filter to one back-end system, and route messages that pass a different Schema Validation filter to a different system. You can use Policy Containers to help manage your policies. A Policy Container is typically used to group together a number of similar policies (for example, all authentication policies) or to act as an umbrella around several policies that relate to a particular policy (for example, all policies for the `getQuote` Web Service). A number of useful policies that ship with the Enterprise Gateway are found in the `Policy Library` Policy Container. This container is pre-populated with policies to return various types of faults to the client and policies to block certain types of threatening content, among others. You can also add your own policies to this container, and create your own Policy Containers as necessary to suit your own requirements. The `Configuration` Policy Container is used to store the authentication and non-editable content-based filtering that is applied to configuration messages. This should only be changed under strict supervision from the Oracle support team.
## Certificates
The Enterprise Gateway must be able to trust X.509 certificates to establish SSL connections with external servers, validate XML Signatures, encrypt XML segments for certain recipients, and for other such cryptographic operations. Similarly, a private key is required to carry out certain other cryptographic operations, such as message signing and decrypting data. The Trusted Certificate Store contains all the certificates that are considered to be trusted by the Enterprise Gateway. Certificates can be imported into or created by the Certificate Store. You can also assign a private key to the public key stored in a certificate, by importing the private key, or by generating one using the provided interface. For more information on importing and creating certificates, see the Trusted Certificate Store topic.
## Enterprise Gateway User Store
Users are mainly used for authentication purposes in the Enterprise Gateway. In this context, the User Store acts as a repository for user information against which users can be authenticated. You can also store user attributes for each user or user group. For example, you can then use these attributes when generating SAML attribute assertions on behalf of the user. The Enterprise Gateway Users topic contains more details on how to create users, user groups, and attributes.
## System Alerts
The Enterprise Gateway can send system alerts to various error reporting systems in the case of a policy error (for example, when a request is blocked by a policy). Alerts can be sent to a Windows Event Log, UNIX syslog, OPSEC firewall, SNMP NMS, or email recipient. For more details on how to configure the Enterprise Gateway to send these alerts, see the System Alerts topic.
## External Connections
The Enterprise Gateway can leverage your existing identity management infrastructure and avoid maintaining separate silos of user information. For example, if you already have a database full of user credentials, the Enterprise Gateway can authenticate requests against this database, rather than using its own internal user store. Similarly, the Enterprise Gateway can authorize users, lookup user attributes, and validate certificates against third-party identity management servers. You can add each connection to an external system as a global External Connection in the Policy Studio so that it can be reused across all filters and policies. For example, if you create a circuit that authenticates users against an LDAP directory and then validates an XML signature by retrieving a public key from the same LDAP directory, it makes sense to create a global External Connection for that LDAP directory. You can then select the LDAP Connection in both the authentication and XML signature verification filters, rather than having to reconfigure it in both filters. For example, you can use the External Connections interface to configure global connections such as the following: Authentication Repository Profiles Database Connections Kerberos Services LDAP Connections OCSP Connections XKMS Connections You can also use External Connections in cases where you want to configure a group of related URLs. This is most useful in cases where you want to round-robin between a number of related URLs to ensure high availability. When the Enterprise Gateway is configured to use a URL Connection Set (instead of just a single URL), it round-robins between the URLs in the set. For more information on configuring External Connections and Connection Sets, see the External Connections topic.
## Schema Cache
The global Schema Cache contains all the XML Schemas that the Enterprise Gateway can use to validate incoming requests against. The Schema Validation filter validates the format of an incoming message against a schema from the cache. This ensures that only messages of the correct format are processed by the target system. For instructions on how to import XML Schemas into the cache, see the Schema Cache topic. When you have imported your schemas, see the Schema Validation tutorial for instructions on how to validate XML messages against the schemas in the cache.
## Black list and White list
The White list is a global library of regular expressions that can be used across several different filters. For example, the Validate HTTP Headers, Validate Query String, and Validate Message Attributes filters all use regular expressions from the White list to ensure that various parts of the request contain expected content. The White list is pre-populated with regular expressions that can be used to identify common data formats, such as alphanumeric characters, dates, email addresses, IP addresses, and so on. For example, if a particular HTTP header is expected to contain an email address, the Email Address expression from the library can be run against the HTTP header to ensure that it contains an email address as expected. This is yet another way that the Enterprise Gateway can ensure that only the correct data reaches the Web Service. While the White list contains regular expressions to identify valid data, the Black list contains regular expressions that are used to identify common attack signatures. For example, this includes expressions to scan for SQL injection attacks, buffer overflow attacks, ASCII control characters, DTD entity expansion attacks, and many more. You can run various parts of the request message against the regular expressions contained in the Black list library. For example, the HTTP headers, request query string, and message (MIME) parts can be scanned for SQL injection attacks by selecting the SQL-type expressions from the Black list. The Threatening Content filter also uses regular expressions from the Black list to identify attack signatures in request messages. For more details on running regular expressions, see the following topics: Validate HTTP Headers Validate Query String Validate Message Attributes Threatening Content
## Caches
You can configure the Enterprise Gateway to cache responses from a back-end Web Service. For example, if the Enterprise Gateway receives two successive identical requests it can (if configured) take the response for this request from the cache instead of routing the request on to the Web Service and asking it to generate the response again. As a result, excess traffic is diverted from the Web Service making it more responsive to requests for other services, the Enterprise Gateway is saved the processing effort of routing identical requests unnecessarily to the Web Service, and the client benefits from the far shorter response time. Local caches can be configured for each running instance of the Enterprise Gateway. If you have deployed multiple Enterprise Gateways throughout your network, you can configure a distributed cache where cache events on one cache are replicated across all others. For example, if a response message is cached at one instance of the Enterprise Gateway, it is added to all other caches. For more details on how to configure the Enterprise Gateway to use local and distributed caches, see the Global Caches topic.