Agentry Work Manager end-to-end encryption

[RobEricsson]

Hi,

End-to-end encryption of data is important for a Work Manager customer of ours. I understand how to encrypt the communications between the mobile device and the Agentry server. However, it isn't clear if the channel between the Agentry server and the ERP system is encrypted.

My (incomplete) understanding is that the password is encrypted when passed through JCo by default, but that the user id and data is not. I haven't checked it myself with a network sniffer.

Is it possible to set up SNC on the JCo Connection between the Agentry server and ERP backend? If SNC is not possible, how can we encrypt the communication between the Agentry server and ERP backend?

Thanks.

Rob

[Former Member]

Hi Rob,

Did you get the solution to work with SNC of this JCo connection? I'm currently looking for the same thing but unable to find any documentation on this.

hope you or anyone else out there can now share some light on this?

thanks.

John

[jason_latko]

I pinged a colleague of mine on the product development team.  He may have an idea here.

Jason Latko - Senior Product Developer at SAP

[Former Member]

Work Manager 6.2 (and i believe 6.1 as well but it may require applying an SAP Note to support this, I don't remember offhand) allow for customization of the connection by configuration of the JavaBE.ini file.

With this, you can set the parameters that are used to configure the connection directly. The example below might be used to configure the connection to use a given load balancer. There are many options for SNC as well and can be found in the JCo3 javadocs (see the page on the DestinationDataProvider interface for an overview). The empty parameters are important as that lets us un-set any normally set value.

I haven't personally setup an snc connection environment but I believe it is possible.

example JavaBE.ini section:

[JCO3_CUSTOM_PROPERTIES]

; be careful with this section as it can be used to both extend and/or override base property values on the destination

;

#### for group logon

jco.client.ashost=

jco.client.sysnr=

jco.client.mshost=example.hostname

jco.client.r3name=R3N

jco.client.group=PUBLIC

relevent section from the JCo3 Javadocs

SNC configuration
jco.client.snc_mode	Secure network connection (SNC) mode, 0 (off) or 1 (on)
jco.client.snc_partnername	SNC partner, e.g. p:CN=R3, O=XYZ-INC, C=EN
jco.client.snc_qop	SNC level of security, 1 to 9
jco.client.snc_myname	SNC name. Overrides default SNC partner
jco.client.snc_lib	Path to library which provides SNC service
jco.client.snc_sso	Turn on/off SSO of SNC mechanism. If set to 0 fall back to user/password credentials instead. Valid values are 1 (yes, default) and 0 (no).

[RobEricsson]

Hi John,

This information is a little dated, but you can use Secure Network Communication using the JCO library. We didn't pursue this so I don't know how well it works in practice.

Work Manager does not does not have the SNC parameters handled out of the box (at least in version 5.x), but you can extend the com.syclo.sap.User class initSession method to to use the SNC parameters. Most likely, you will also have to to extend the com.syclo.sap.Server class to make sure the new User object is called.

Rob