Windows Server 2003 Security Infrastructures: Core Security Features (HP Technologies)

Overview

Many of today’s organizations have an IT infrastructure that is made up of a mix of Windows, UNIX, and mainframe computers. Although we surely should not neglect the importance of the mainframe and its applications, we must also admit that more and more organizations are moving critical applications to the UNIX platform and, lately, to even the Windows platform. CIOs usually also do not want to bet on a single horse; they prefer not to stick to a single platform and vendor.

All of these arguments have put a growing focus on the integration of Windows and UNIX platforms and their applications. Platform and application integration inevitably includes integration of core security services such as account management and authentication. Account management deals with the management of security principal identities and their attributes (and possibly also user privileges). An authentication service deals with the verification of a security principal’s identity.

The goal of this chapter is to give an overview of the different Windows and UNIX account management and authentication integration solutions currently available on the IT market.

• Regarding Windows, this chapter focuses on the Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 platforms—all of them are running in an AD-centric environment.

• Regarding UNIX, I will try to cover the most common UNIX flavors in use today: HP-UX, Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, and Linux.