MDSEC, the same product that prevents unauthorized access to MDXREF and MDCMS, may also be used to protect your own in-house iSeries applications.

The programmer simply describes an application function to MDSEC and then MDSEC assigns a security code to that function. The programmer then embeds a call to MDSEC's security checking function with the security code inside the necessary program(s) and a reply is given as to whether or not the user is authorized to the function.

The individual user authority levels can easily be set in seconds via the included security administration tools.

Authority levels handled by MDSEC

• a user or group of users
• an application or group of applications
• general authority to an application's function
• reduced authority to an application's function based on set limits (for example, the user is only allowed to delete an item if it has a value of less than 500).

Authorization List manager

The management of iSeries authorization lists is very cumbersome when done using the commands supplied by IBM. Included in MDSEC are the following tools for managing authorization lists:

• search lists for a specific user
• change or remove authorizations for all users in a list at once.
• change or remove all lists for a user at once
• map the authorization list entries for one user to another user or group of users.
• create, edit or delete the lists themselves.

DDM Security

DDM stands for Distributed Data Management and provides a simple means for accessing and updating data on a target iSeries (System i) using programs running on a local iSeries system.

MDCMS, for example, uses DDM for synchronizing Project and Workflow information as well as for tracking object migrations across systems. If DDM is allowed to be used without sufficient security measures in place, then a significant risk exists that data could be read and manipulated by otherwise unauthorized persons.

The DDM Security feature of MDSEC provides the following features:

• Filter access by user profile
• Filter access by library
• Filter access by individual files, data queues, or data areas
• Filter by usage (view or update)
• Filter by transaction types
• Log some or all DDM transactions