One of the major initiatives University ITS is undertaking is the Authentication and Authorization Project, which seeks to insure that the UniversityXs electronic resources are secure and accessed only by authorized members of the University community. The Problem Exponential growth in the quantity of Information Services provided by and used in the Universityms daily activities is requiring us to take a new look at how members of the Community identify themselves to automated services and how each user is managed within the University environment. In the past, a typical user might have had one or two information services that they used regularly, which often required different user-IDs because they were on the different systems. Over the past several years, as more and more members of the University community have required access to more and more separate services, the number of user-IDs an individual has had to maintain, and the University's ability to manage those identities securely has been stretched. The method of identification, authentication, and authorization used when there were only a few mainframe services is no longer satisfactory in the current distributed network environment.
Identification is the information that a person presents to verify who they are.
Authentication is the determination that a person is truly who they claim to be. Authorization is the determination of whether an authenticated individual has the right to access a particular resource. As the project expands beyond these initial areas, it will continue to focus on services that are widely required and used throughout the community. Next steps might include staff and faculty e-mail, calendaring, file storage, mainframe access, and Web resources. As UConnms project moves forward, local and remote users will realize the benefit of local and remote access to the most critical and common University resources using a single username and password.