InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
June 1, 1998
Directories And Digital Certificates
By
Beth Davis
s more companies venture into the unknown waters of E-commerce, metadirectories will likely act as the unified repositories of information for authorizing and completing online transactions. The directories must be integrated with security applications such as digital certificates.
Digital certificates are encrypted digital IDs that vouch for users' identities. Today, they're generated by public key security systems. But these systems do not include attributes that specify what the owner of the digital certificate is allowed to do--a function IT managers who are piloting public key infrastructure (PKI) systems would like to see. Keeping track of user attributes is exactly what directories are good at.
"Most of us are relying on digital certificates for identity, but they don't necessarily tell you what a person can do,'' says Charles Blauner, VP of security and Internet architectures at J.P. Morgan & Co. "You know who Charles Blauner is, but do you know whether I can do a $500 trade or a $5 million trade? That's a more complicated issue."
Until technology is available that lets organizations embed more attributes into a digital certificate, many experts agree directories are vital to PKI systems. Linking a digital certificate with a directory via LDAP will let a compa ny store user attributes that define which systems or applications a user can access with that user's digital certificate.
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Illustration by David Chen
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