Privilege Management Infrastructure

Abstract

Public Key Infrastructures (PKI) are now in place in a number of organizations, and there is a wide amount of material available that can be used to obtain familiarisation with the concept (Adams & Lloyd, 2002; Housley & Polk, 2001; Nash, Brink, & Duane, 2001). Although related to PKI, Privilege Management Infrastructure (PMI) is a recent development in the network security field. PMI has been designed to supply the authorization function lacking in the PKI model. This article will provide an overview of PMI, state the relationship between PKI and PMI, and will finally provide a number of examples of present PMI architectures such as PERMIS (Chadwick & Otenko, 2002), OASIS Active Security (Yao, Moody, & Bacon, 2001) and AKENTI (Thompson, Essari, & Mudumbai, 2003).