Establishing a security context

After initializing the administration API, you must create an SSL connection between the Java™ application and the Verify Identity Access policy server.

This connection is referred to as a security context by the administration API. The security context provides for the secure transfer of administrative requests and data between the Java application and the policy server.

A security context can be established using either user ID and password-based authentication or certificate-based authentication. In either case, the security context is represented by the PDContext object. Multiple PDContext objects can be created and used within the same JVM.

PDContext creation is a resource exhaustive operation. Although there is no upper limit to creating multiple PDContext objects, system resource limitation eventually determines how many can be successfully created and used. Create and pool only a few PDContext objects in the application environment.

The close() method provided in the PDContext class is used only to clean up the logger data that is associated with the context. The close() method but does not destroy the context.

For more Information about Java authentication classes and methods, see the IBM Verify Identity Access for Web: Authorization Java Classes Developer Reference.