SC Magazine, October 2002
Part
One: Sound ROI with security benefits
Do you always know who is accessing your company's systems? Illena
Armstrong examines how you can guard your doors
"All of the vulnerabilities that arise
from poor administration, whether they relate to access management or
appli cation management, generally create two categories of threats -
external vulnerabilities and internal vulnerabilities," he [Adrian
Viego, CTO, Business Layers] says. "The external threats are easy to
classify, but internal threats are significantly more serious. Beyond
weak account credential policies, it is not uncommon that many companies
issue their users significantly more privileges than they actually
require to perform their duties."...
As organizations increasingly expose their internal infrastructure to
web, wireless and other access mechanisms, their ability to protect that
infrastructure with a perimeter defense system declines significantly.
"This blurring of internal and external users causes the
access-management problem to grow exponentially," says Gabriel Waters,
director of security strategy with Novell. "For example, in the
traditional model where they must[sigma] manage the number of users times the
number of applications, the problem is relatively linear. However, they
now face multiple access devices, times the types of users, times the
number of applications, hence the exponential problem. Adding to this
problem is the fact that many of these systems will have their own
identity store/user database, their own policy around which users can
access them and their own administrator."...
Part
Two: Authorizing your users
Richard Mackey investigates whether secure and simple ways of
authorizing users are currently feasible
While knowing who is gaining access to
your network is absolutely necessary, it is far from sufficient. Once
authenticated, making sure that each user is only allowed access to the
appropriate files, applications or services, is often the missing link.
This is where authorization by consistently managing fine-grain
access to resources comes into play.
6:13:56 AM 
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