Blockchain: It's All About Trust

Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics, Cyber Security & Cloud are the hot topics of today's Digital World, so just wanted to explore more about these topics.

Blockchain is more familiar to all as everyone knows about cryptocurrentcies like BitCoin, Ethereum, Ripple, BitCash etc. I believe some of you might have made good profit from these cryptocurrencies as well. These cryptocurrencies are based on Blockchain Technology.

Blockchain (chain of blocks):

Blockchain refers to the growing list of nodes/blocks which are inter connected with each other through cryptography. In blockchain technology, data will be distributed across various blocks and will be stored in the form of hashes. If one block/node is compromised, the information from that block/node cannot be used alone. Idea behind blockchain was to decentralize the information. There's no concept of parent-child or master-slave in Blockchain, every block/node is treated/used as master or parent. Blockchain helps in managing the digital identities by storing them on distributed network and it can also be used to secure the personal information’s of end users.

 

Example: 

Suppose my password is of 12 characters and I store each character at a different place. Even if someone finds my 1 character, he cannot login into the account. He must find all the 12 characters to login into my account, but these 12 characters are stored at 12 different location so probability to find all the 12 characters from 12 different location is very less as compare to finding all the characters at 1 place. 

Don't worry, I don't keep my password like this. 😊

 

Blockchain IAM:

I have read various posts on using Blockchain Identity and Access Management but couldn’t find the answer of the question “Should we move to Blockchain based Identity and Access Management?” I know that data will be more secure in Blockchain based IAM but there are other challenges also exist like Identity Theft, Key Management etc but let's see what are the solutions to overcome these challenges or if we can find something better than existing solutions.

OIM 12c REST API Sample Code

Here's the sample code for making a REST Web Service Client call to OIM 12c:

String authString = "xelsysadm:Abcd1234";





NOTE: It's just a sample code for learning.






Disclaimer

All content provided on this blog is for informational purposes only. The owner of this blog makes no representations as to the accuracy or completeness of any information on this site or found by following any link on this site. The owner will not be liable for any errors or omissions in this information nor for the availability of this information. The owner will not be liable for any losses, injuries, or damages from the display or use of this information

OIM 12c: Enhanced Schedule Jobs

There were two major drawbacks with the schedule jobs in older versions of OIM:

• Monitoring the failed schedule jobs (Custom report or code was required)
• Parameters which were passed during some schedule job execution

Oracle has provide solutions for both the problems listed above. Now we can see the parameters which were passed during the job execution and it also sends email notification to a particular user, distribution list or role.

No custom code or report is required to monitor failed jobs.

Just loving this feature.

OIM 12c Schedule Job

OIM 12C - Design Console and New Application On-boarding Process

In OIM 11g R2 PS3, we were getting an alert saying "Design Console" will be removed from next 
 release. Here's the new and updated alert from OIM 12c:

OIM 12c Design Console Alert

Oracle has migrated so many components to OIM User Interface including the "Application On-boarding" which is a very big change. Here are some screens from On-boarding application UI:

Kudos to Oracle Development team to move this feature to UI, this will make on-boarding process easy & cost effective.

OIM 12C Import Export Blank Screen After Installation

While installing OIM 12c (12.2.1.3.0), I didn't use the standard port 14000 and didn't provide any value for OIM Front End URL. I didn't face any issue during installation and saw the success message at the end.

The moment I hit the Import or Export menu items, I saw a 'BLANK SCREEN'. In the logs, I was surprised to see that it was trying to connect to 14000. 

In enterprise manager, I was able to see 14000 as the port for Front End URLs. I changed 14000 to the correct OIM port that helped in loading the Import and Export forms properly.

Oracle Identity Governace 12c 12.2.1.3.0

Oracle Identity Governance (OIM) 12c

As you know, Oracle has released Oracle Identity Governance 12c (OIM 12.2.1.3.0) last week, Oracle has made significant changes in the installation process. Now we have a quick installer which doesn't take much time to install OIM 12c which was a big pain earlier.

This quick installer contains all the components which are required for OIM: FMW Binaries, RCU, SOA, Weblogic. Now you no need to download and install these products separately. 

There's also another method on installation "OIM Standalone Installation", I didn't try that one. 

OIM 12c User Interface looks similar to OIM 11g R2 PS3 User Interface. 

They have invested time and money to make Deployment Manager experience better. Personally I was OK with the existing one as well. Here're the screen shot of Import and Export screens:

IMPORT:

OIM 12c Deployment Manager - IMPORT

EXPORT:

OIM 12c Deployment Manager - EXPORT

Here's the link where you can find details of OIM 12c Simplified Installation:

Simplified Installation: CLICK HERE


Access Policies have been moved to Self Service console and major improvements have been made to Certifications. Here's the link where you can find details of New Features of OIM 12c:

New Features: CLICK HERE

Oracle Identity and Access Management 12c is OUT

Oracle Identity and Access Management 12c PS3 (12.2.1.3.0) version is out and available for downloads:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/id-mgmt/downloads/oid-11gr2-2104316.html

Oracle Identity Manager: Security Issue

Today I found another issue with Identity Status (User Status) in Oracle Identity Manager, here are the sequence of activities which I performed:

1. "User A" is logged in into OIM and doing some operations from his/her laptop. 
2. At the same time, System Administrator logged in into OIM and disable the user or user gets disabled as part of Trusted User Reconciliation.
3. Identity Status changed to Disabled on UI as well in User Repository(Database) successfully.
4. Still user was able to perform various operations in OIM like request submission for self, others etc. If that user has administrative privileges then he/she can do anything.

In short, if someone has active session of OIM, he/she can do anything until that session terminates. 

OIM doesn't allow to create new session if Identity Status is Disabled but it must terminate the existing active sessions as well.

OIM - Provision Entitlement Programmatically - Error

For a PoC, I was trying to do provisioning of entitlement through APIs. While making the api call, I was getting error "Entitlement attribute not marked as key in reconciliation field mapping for ...".

I checked all the configurations, checkbox for Key was already selected. Tried with creating reconciliation profiles and restarting servers multiple times but didn't help.

I found the reference of the same issue in the following Oracle document under General Issues and Workaround section


https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E40329_01/relnotes.1112/e56629/id_mgr.htm#ASIRN4726

Document was also saying the same thing that set the Key property for entitlement field. 

Finally I had to do reverse engineering on the API and found that it was an issue with Entitlement object which I was passing. It wasn't mentioned anywhere in the document that it is required to set few of the mandatory properties of Entitlement object and even the error message was misleading.

It took 2-3 hours to find the actual root cause but anyways I'm glad that it's working now, no need to open any new SR for this.