Using Transport Level Authentication 

Use

SAP NetWeaver systems enable you to use transport level authentication and SSO for Web services (WS) with a user ID and password, X.509 certificates or authentication assertion tickets.

Prerequisites

To use authentication with X.509 certificates, you have to enable the use of cryptographic functions for the AS ABAP system. For more information, see Digital Signatures and Encryption.

For WS SSO with authentication assertion tickets, the WS consumer must be configured to issue logon tickets and the WS provider needs a trust relationship to the issuer to accept the ticket.

Features

When using transport level WS SSO, the AS ABAP uses standard HTTP authentication mechanisms. Respectively, the SSO mechanisms for WS access are enabled by the AS ABAP and AS Java components that enable Web-based authentication. Thereby, authentication credentials for authentication with user ID and password and authentication assertion tickets are transported in the HTTP header. X.509 certificate authentication uses the underlying SSL security protocol over HTTP to perform the authentication.