ABSTRACT
An important requirement of any information management system is to protect information against improper disclosure or modification (known as confidentiality and integrity, respectively). Three mutually supportive technologies are used to achieve this goal. Authentication, access control, and audit together provide the foundation for information and system security as follows. Authentication establishes the identity of one party to another. Most commonly, authentication establishes the identity of a user to some part of the system typically by means of a password. More generally, authentication can be computer-tocomputer or process-to-process and mutual in both directions. Access control determines what one party will allow another to do with respect to resources and objects mediated by the former. Access control usually requires authentication as a prerequisite. The audit process gathers data about activity in the system and analyzes it to discover security violations or diagnose their cause. Analysis can occur off line after the fact or it can occur on line more or less in real time. In the latter case, the process is usually called intrusion detection. This chapter discusses the scope and characteristics of these security controls.
