Secure Access Management: Trends, Drivers and Solutions

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 128 KB
• Volume: 7
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1363-4127
• DOI: 10.1016/s1363-4127(02)00309-6

✦ Synopsis

As information systems move from closed environments to increasingly open environments, physical trust domains are rapidly vanishing and the demand for secure access management solutions is growing dramatically. This paper examines the trends and growth drivers in a variety of markets, and presents two different solutions. The first solution, X.509-style PKI, is being pushed forward by the PKI industry as the solution to secure access management, but nothing could be further from the truth. X.509-style PKI was invented in 1978 for the purpose of facilitating message encryption, with entity authentication serving to prevent man-inthe-middle attacks. Authentication as used for message encryption, however, is a far cry from managing the access of authorized parties to identity-related information, with all its privacy, security, and performance sensitivities. We show how X.509-style PKI fails in the context of access management, and present a solution based on Digital Credentials.