The move to open systems will reduce this dependence. Application systems will increasingly be built on products from a variety of vendors. But many needed standards are not complete, and some non-standard functions will always be needed because standards must necessarily lag innovations in technology. Organizations must build applications from both standard and non-standard components. It may be easier for intruders to attack a system whose behavior is standardized and well known, or which shares common flaws with other systems built on the same standards.
Security is thus a vital concern with open systems.
This report was prepared to help service designers use standard, open systems platforms in building security into their software applications. Security in an open system environment may be affected by the need to use both standard and non-standard components, and by the possibility for incompatibilities among products that claim to meet the same standard. This report is intended to aid software developers who are building telecommunications applications on open systems platforms. It is designed to help programmers understand the open system environment and to use open system services in building secure applications. It is not possible to describe all of them in this document.