EINet EINet Security Services

EINet Security Services are a unique group of services which allow users to perform business-oriented transactions in a secure manner on the Internet with a high degree of confidence. Traditionally, companies have offered employees "secure" access by providing users direct central access to remote hosts on the Internet. As more accessible hosts are added, this procedure becomes unwieldy for both the system administrators maintaining the accounts and the users who have to remember multiple host names and passwords.

EINet Security Services are based on a distributed network security model with single login to the network. The EINet customer has a single network identity with access to certain secure information resources, as well as access to all of the public resources available on the Internet. This is done with a combination of authentication and access control mechanisms.

To maintain control over access to their resources, people who do business in an open electronic network need authentication services. Authentication is a mechanism by which the identity of users and services can be verified on a network. This is important on a geographically distributed, open network in which users have no prior knowledge about other users or services. EINet provides the software and the operational and administrative support needed to make this security model work successfully on the Internet.

The EINet Security Services include:

User Authentication Service (UAS)
The EINet User Authentication Service (UAS) provides a means for EINet client/server software applications to verify the identity of a given user and service. A central database contains information about users and services that are registered to operate on EINet. EINet's UAS is based on the KERBEROS(TM) technology from MIT's Athena Project.

Access Control Services
The EINet Access Control Server (ACS) enables service providers to control access to their services based on the customer's ID and group affiliation. The ACS is operated by the service provider, who maintains the access control information for each of his services. The ACS supports access control of various resources based on authentication identifiers already defined by the UAS.
EINet monitors and logs the secure transactions which occur when EINet services are used. EINet also provides a series of statistical usage reports based on user name, organization, and service to the service provider. These reports allow service providers to closely monitor the activity of their service(s).

In the future, the UAS will be offered as a product for internal corporate use and will be expanded to verify company profiles, financial information, and product offerings. Data encryption services are also being developed to enable secure data transfer. In addition, statistical usage reports will be expanded to provide for future "fee-per-transaction" service charging.

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