CW 361

Bert Lagaisse and Frank Piessens
PAM.NET: A .NET Framework For Pluggable Authentication Modules

Abstract

Authentication is one of the core security services of a distributed application platform. A variety of mechanisms to perform authentication have been developed, and it is beneficial if the choice for a specific mechanism is not hardcoded in an application. Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) is the name of a technology to support flexible changes with respect to the authentication mechanisms that an application uses. In this report, we describe an implementation of this technology, PAM.NET, on the .NET Common Language Runtime, Microsoft's new application platform. PAM.NET is well integrated with .NET's role based access control, and enables a developer to build platform independent, extensible and configurable authentication and access control into an application.

mailto: F. Piessens