Security considerations for DOORS

You can strengthen the security of your installation by customizing security settings and setting up user access controls. Make sure that you know about any security limitations that you might encounter with this application.

Enabling security during the installation process

The IBM® Engineering Requirements Management DOORS® (DOORS) security model provides a secure connection with certificates and client side authorization and authentication. When enabled, server security replicates a set of security checks on the server. To enable server security, you must install and configure the IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS - Web Access (DWA) server and the server security version of the DOORS client and database server.

To protect against cross-site request forgery (CSRF) security attacks, administrators can set a property in the DOORS festival.xml file. See Modifying the core configuration file.

Enabling secure communication between multiple applications

Security for integrations that use Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) is provided by OAuth 1.0a, which is an open protocol that provides secure API authorization.

Ports, protocols, and services

You can configure DWA to use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS) for HTTPS security protocol. You can also configure DWA so that users can access it by using smart cards instead of logging in with a user name and a password.
You can configure DOORS so that users can log on only by using smart cards or certificates.
Your team can use electronic signatures with module baselines to provide a secure way to review and sign information at various stages of the development process.

Security standard compliance

DOORS offers compliance with US encryption standards Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) publication 140-2, NIST Special Publication (SP) 800-131A, and National Security Agency (NSA) Suite B. To comply with these standards, you can specify a TLS version for encrypted communication with DWA and the DOORS database server. If you specify TLS 1.2 protocol, refer to vendor documentation to determine whether your browser supports that version.

See also the technote Configuring the DOORS database server and client for compliance with NIST SP 800-131A.

Setting up user roles and access

You can set the login policy that controls the level of security for the DOORS database.
You can create users and user groups and configure password rules for maintaining user security. You can enable system user names to log in to the DOORS database. System user names are the names that individuals use to log in to their computers, for example their Windows user names. The DOORS database server can keep a record of every failed login and every successful login.

You can configure access rights for each item of data in your DOORS database. DOORS provides five access rights for user groups: read, modify, create, delete, and administrative control.

Privacy policy considerations

Depending on the configurations that are deployed, this software offering might use cookies that can help enable you to collect personally identifiable information. For information about this offering's use of cookies see "Privacy policy considerations" section in Documentation notices for DOORS.


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