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Authorization and Access Control (aac)
Charter
Status: Concluded March, 1995
Chair(s):
Clifford Neuman
Description of Working Group:
The goal of the Authorization and Access Control Working Group
is to develop guidelines and an Application Programming Interface
(API) through which network accessible applications can uniformly
specify access control information. This API will allow applications
to make access control decisions when clients are not local users,
might not be members of a common organization, and often not known to
the service or application in advance.
Several authentication mechanisms are in place on the Internet, but
most applications are written with local applications in mind and no
guidelines exist for supporting authorization and access control based
on the output of such authentication mechanisms. The CAT Working
Group developed the GSS-API, a common API to support authentication.
The AAC Working Group will develop a common API that accepts the
identity of a client (perhaps the output of the GSS-API), a reference
to an object to be accessed, and optionally an indication of the
operation to be performed. The API will return a list of authorized
operations or a yes/no answer that can be easily used by the
application.
A second, longer term purpose of the working group will be to
examine evolving mechanisms and architectures for authorization in
distributed systems and to establish criteria which enable
interworking of confidence and trust across systems. The working
group will develop additional goals and milestones related to
this purpose and will submit a revised charter once the appropriate
goals and milestones are determined. To the extent possible this
additional work will encourage evolution toward credential formats
that more readily allow support for or translation across multiple
mechanisms.
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