Working with Policy Update Lists

For license servers that do not have access to a database for storing information about policies, you may wish to use a policy update list to notify the license server of updated policies. Policy Update Lists may contain updated versions of policies or a list of policy IDs that have been revoked. If a policy update list is supplied in HandlerConfiguration, the SDK will enforce this list when issuing a license.

Policies may also be revoked if content owners or distributors want to discontinue issuing licenses under a particular policy. A policy update list may be used to enforce policy revocation in the SDK. Policy update lists may also be used to provide a list of updated policies to the SDK. Note that revoking a policy does not revoke licenses that have already been issued. It only prevents additional licenses from being issued under that policy.

Working with policy update lists involves the use of a PolicyUpdateListFactory object. To create a policy update list, load an existing policy update list, and check whether a policy has been updated or revoked by using the Java API, perform the following steps:

1. Set up your development environment and include all of the JAR files mentioned in Setting up the development environment within your project.
2. Create a ServerCredentialFactory instance to load the credentials needed for signing.
3. Create a PolicyUpdateListFactory instance using the ServerCredential you created.
4. Specify the policy ID to be revoked.
5. Create a PolicyRevocationEntry object using the policy ID String you just created, and add it to the policy update list by passing it into PolicyUpdateListFactory.addRevocationEntry(). Generate the new policy update list by calling PolicyUpdateListFactory.generatePolicyUpdateList(). Similarly, updated policies can be added to the list using PolicyUpdateEntry.
6. If a policy update list already exists, you can serialize it for loading by calling PolicyUpdateList.getBytes(). To load the list, call PolicyUpdateListFactory.loadPolicyUpdateList() and pass in the serialized list.
7. Verify the signature is valid and the list was signed by the correct license server certificate by calling PolicyUpdateList.verifySignature().
8. To check whether an entry was revoked, pass the policy ID String into PolicyUpdateList.isRevoked(). Alternatively, the list can be passed into HandlerConfiguration and it will be enforced when licenses are issued.

To add additional entries to an existing PolicyUpdateList, load an existing policy update list. Create a new PolicyUpdateListFactory instance. Call P olicyUpdateListFactory.addEntries to add all the entries from the old list to the new list. Call PolicyUpdateListFactory.addRevocationEntry or addUpdatedEntry to add any new revocation or update entries to the PolicyUpdateList.

For sample code demonstrating how to create a policy update list, load an existing policy update list, and check whether a policy has been revoked, see com.adobe.flashaccess.samples.policyupdatelist .CreatePolicyUpdateList in the Reference Implementation Command Line Tools “samples” directory.