Secure Computer Applications in an Enterprise Environment

Abstract

Sophisticated computing environments support many of the complex tasks whicharise in modern enterprises. An enterprise environment is a collective ofthe organization's software, hardware, networking, and data systems.Typically, many user workstations communicate with shared servers, balancingcomputer processing throughout the organization. In a "secure" modernenterprise issues of authentication, private communication, and protected,shared data space must be addressed. In this thesis we present a generalmodel for adding security to the currently popular enterprise architecture:the World Wide Web (WWW).

The results of our investigation into adding security to the generalWWW architecture are reported in this document. We focus onauthenticating users (Kerberos), establishing a secure communicationlink for private data exchange (SSL), protected space to store shareddata (AFS filesystem), and an enhanced server (Apache) to integrate thesecomponents. After presenting our secure model, we describe a prototypeapplication, built using our approach, which addresses a common problemof secure online submission of homework assignments in a universityenvironment.