The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol is an open, vendor-neutral, industry standard application protocol for accessing and maintaining distributed directory information services over an Internet Protocol (IP) network. Directory services play an important role in developing intranet and Internet applications by allowing the sharing of information about users, systems, networks, services, and applications throughout the network. As examples, directory services may provide any organized set of records, often with a hierarchical structure, such as a corporate email directory. Similarly, a telephone directory is a list of subscribers with an address and a phone number.
A password, sometimes called a passcode, is secret data, typically a string of characters, usually used to confirm a user's identity. Traditionally, passwords were expected to be memorized, but the large number of password-protected services that a typical individual accesses can make memorization of unique passwords for each service impractical. Using the terminology of the NIST Digital Identity Guidelines, the secret is held by a party called the claimant while the party verifying the identity of the claimant is called the verifier. When the claimant successfully demonstrates knowledge of the password to the verifier through an established authentication protocol, the verifier is able to infer the claimant's identity.
A public key infrastructure (PKI) is a set of roles, policies, hardware, software and procedures needed to create, manage, distribute, use, store and revoke digital certificates and manage public-key encryption.
Terminal Access Controller Access-Control System refers to a family of related protocols handling remote authentication and related services for network access control through a centralized server. The original TACACS protocol, which dates back to 1984, was used for communicating with an authentication server, common in older UNIX networks including but not limited to the ARPANET, MILNET and BBNNET. It spawned related protocols:
In cryptanalysis and computer security, password cracking is the process of guessing passwords protecting a computer system. A common approach is to repeatedly try guesses for the password and to check them against an available cryptographic hash of the password. Another type of approach is password spraying, which is often automated and occurs slowly over time in order to remain undetected, using a list of common passwords.
Single sign-on (SSO) is an authentication scheme that allows a user to log in with a single ID to any of several related, yet independent, software systems.
cPanel is web hosting control panel software developed by cPanel, L.L.C. It provides a graphical interface (GUI) and automation tools designed to simplify the process of hosting a web site for the website owner or "end user". It enables administration through a standard web browser using a three-tier structure. While cPanel is limited to managing a single hosting account, cPanel & WHM allow the administration of the entire server.
FTPS is an extension to the commonly used File Transfer Protocol (FTP) that adds support for the Transport Layer Security (TLS) and, formerly, the Secure Sockets Layer cryptographic protocols.
Digest access authentication is one of the agreed-upon methods a web server can use to negotiate credentials, such as username or password, with a user's web browser. This can be used to confirm the identity of a user before sending sensitive information, such as online banking transaction history. It applies a hash function to the username and password before sending them over the network. In contrast, basic access authentication uses the easily reversible Base64 encoding instead of hashing, making it non-secure unless used in conjunction with TLS.
In cryptography, PBKDF1 and PBKDF2 are key derivation functions with a sliding computational cost, used to reduce vulnerability to brute-force attacks.
In cryptography, key stretching techniques are used to make a possibly weak key, typically a password or passphrase, more secure against a brute-force attack by increasing the resources it takes to test each possible key. Passwords or passphrases created by humans are often short or predictable enough to allow password cracking, and key stretching is intended to make such attacks more difficult by complicating a basic step of trying a single password candidate. Key stretching also improves security in some real-world applications where the key length has been constrained, by mimicking a longer key length from the perspective of a brute-force attacker.
Network Security Services (NSS) is a collection of cryptographic computer libraries designed to support cross-platform development of security-enabled client and server applications with optional support for hardware TLS/SSL acceleration on the server side and hardware smart cards on the client side. NSS provides a complete open-source implementation of cryptographic libraries supporting Transport Layer Security (TLS) / Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and S/MIME. NSS releases prior to version 3.14 are tri-licensed under the Mozilla Public License 1.1, the GNU General Public License, and the GNU Lesser General Public License. Since release 3.14, NSS releases are licensed under GPL-compatible Mozilla Public License 2.0.
There are a number of security and safety features new to Windows Vista, most of which are not available in any prior Microsoft Windows operating system release.
This is a comparison of notable free and open-source configuration management software, suitable for tasks like server configuration, orchestration and infrastructure as code typically performed by a system administrator.
WSO2 Mashup Server, an open-source mashup platform that used to host JavaScript-based mashups, is now deprecated and no longer in use. It was based on Apache Axis2 and other open-source projects, and allowed JavaScript to consume, compose and emit web services, feeds, scraped web pages, email, and instant messages. The source code was freely available under the open-source Apache License. It provided a runtime platform for developing and deploying mashups and could be downloaded and deployed locally or within an organization.
bcrypt is a password-hashing function designed by Niels Provos and David Mazières, based on the Blowfish cipher and presented at USENIX in 1999. Besides incorporating a salt to protect against rainbow table attacks, bcrypt is an adaptive function: over time, the iteration count can be increased to make it slower, so it remains resistant to brute-force search attacks even with increasing computation power.
SAP Logon Tickets represent user credentials in SAP systems. When enabled, users can access multiple SAP applications and services through SAP GUI and web browsers without further username and password inputs from the user. SAP Logon Tickets can also be a vehicle for enabling single sign-on across SAP boundaries; in some cases, logon tickets can be used to authenticate into 3rd party applications such as Microsoft-based web applications.
KeePass Password Safe is a free and open-source password manager primarily for Windows. It officially supports macOS and Linux operating systems through the use of Mono. Additionally, there are several unofficial ports for Windows Phone, Android, iOS, and BlackBerry devices, which normally work with the same copied or shared (remote) password database. KeePass stores usernames, passwords, and other fields, including free-form notes and file attachments, in an encrypted file. This file can be protected by any combination of a master password, a key file, and the current Windows account details. By default, the KeePass database is stored on a local file system.
In computer security, general access control includes identification, authorization, authentication, access approval, and audit. A more narrow definition of access control would cover only access approval, whereby the system makes a decision to grant or reject an access request from an already authenticated subject, based on what the subject is authorized to access. Authentication and access control are often combined into a single operation, so that access is approved based on successful authentication, or based on an anonymous access token. Authentication methods and tokens include passwords, biometric scans, physical keys, electronic keys and devices, hidden paths, social barriers, and monitoring by humans and automated systems.
In cryptography, the Salted Challenge Response Authentication Mechanism (SCRAM) is a family of modern, password-based challenge–response authentication mechanisms providing authentication of a user to a server. As it is specified for Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL), it can be used for password-based logins to services like LDAP, HTTP, SMTP, POP3, IMAP and JMAP (e-mail), XMPP (chat), or MongoDB and PostgreSQL (databases). For XMPP, supporting it is mandatory.
