Secure Authentication Process for High Sensitive Data E-Services: A Roadmap

Abstract

The widespread diffusion of online services provided by public and private organizations, firstly driven by e-commerce and more recently by egovernment applications, has stressed the need of secure ways to authenticate users who need to access online resources. The huge number of resources accessible on the Web leads to different authentication mechanisms implementations that often require multiple log-on actions also in intradomain multiservices scenario. In case of high sensitive services, users’ authentication plays a role of paramount importance. In this article is presented a case study that gives a roadmap of authentication mechanisms implemented at different levels of services’ software structure. The discussion starts by illustrating different authentication solutions implemented at operating system, application server or components level to conclude with Single Sign-On approach. For each solution, pros and cons are discussed. The SSO system, called CAS++, developed as an extension to Yale University’s CAS, is then presented.