A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.
This draft is a work item of the Internet Architecture Board Working Group of the IETF.
Title : A Survey of Authentication Mechanisms
Author(s) : E. Rescorla
Filename : draft-iab-auth-mech-01.txt
Pages : 33
Date : 2003-7-24
Authentication is perhaps the most basic security problem for design-
ers of network protocols. Even the early Internet protocols such as
TELNET and FTP, which provided no other security services, made pro-
vision for user authentication. Unfortunately, these early authenti-
cation systems were wholly inadequate for the Internet Threat Model
[REF] and a vast array of other authentication mechanisms have been
introduced in an attempt to close these holes.
The most striking thing about these security mechanisms is how many
of them are essentially similar. There are only 7 basic classes of
authentication protocol but there are a large number of slightly dif-
ferent protocols with essentially the same security properties. This
memo surveys the space of authentication mechanisms, describes the
basic classes and provides examples of protocols which fit into each
class.
A URL for this Internet-Draft is:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-iab-auth-mech-01.txt
To remove yourself from the IETF Announcement list, send a message to
ietf-announce-request with the word unsubscribe in the body of the message.
Internet-Drafts are also available by anonymous FTP. Login with the username
"anonymous" and a password of your e-mail address. After logging in,
type "cd internet-drafts" and then
"get draft-iab-auth-mech-01.txt".
A list of Internet-Drafts directories can be found in
http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html
or ftp://ftp.ietf.org/ietf/1shadow-sites.txt
Internet-Drafts can also be obtained by e-mail.
Send a message to:
mailserv@ietf.org.
In the body type:
"FILE /internet-drafts/draft-iab-auth-mech-01.txt".
NOTE: The mail server at ietf.org can return the document in
MIME-encoded form by using the "mpack" utility. To use this
feature, insert the command "ENCODING mime" before the "FILE"
command. To decode the response(s), you will need "munpack" or
a MIME-compliant mail reader. Different MIME-compliant mail readers
exhibit different behavior, especially when dealing with
"multipart" MIME messages (i.e. documents which have been split
up into multiple messages), so check your local documentation on
how to manipulate these messages.
Below is the data which will enable a MIME compliant mail reader
implementation to automatically retrieve the ASCII version of the
Internet-Draft.
- <ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-iab-auth-mech-01.txt>
-
