Web Services Based Authentication System for Intranets

Abstract

Web-enabled Intranet applications become more and more important in the enterprise level organizations, where end users need to access many different applications daily to accomplish their jobs. Applications which handle confidential information or numeric transactions in Intranet require user’s authentication system to handle the authentication and authorization processes. Currently, different types of authentication systems depend on usernames and passwords are used to authenticate Intranet application’s users against multiple directory stores. As the number of directory stores grows the development overhead of user’s authentication process in Intranet applications against those directories increases. Developers like to have a unified simple and efficient way to authenticate users against directory stores. Also as the number of Intranet applications grows, the number of user’s IDs and passwords users have to memorize grow as well. So users make passwords not strong enough to ease memorization, and write passwords in clear text in insecure places, which compromise the security. This thesis provides Intranet users with a single sign-on solution for the problem of memorizing many user IDs and passwords, and provides organizations with a centralized, simple, and efficient directory stores access mechanism to simplify the process of integrating multiple directory stores, and provides the Intranet developers with a standard solution to minimize the development overhead of the authentication process against multiple directory stores, the software prototype provided in this thesis will be designed based on the existing technology, so that clients need not be modified, and servers may have a little modifications.