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The Research Institute has been involved with Internet security technologies from the time of
OSF's DCE
(Distributed Computing Environment) technology.
The RI at Grenoble was involved in the efforts to integrate DCE with the
Web. In particular, the Plug-in
Authorization Service project provided an implementation of the DCE
authorization module as a backend to popular web servers such as Netscape
Enterprise Server, Internet Information Server and Apache. The primary benefit
of this project was to enable decentralized and distributed administration of
access control on web servers. The follow-on to this project was the European
Esprit project WIRE.
An important contribution of the RI was to provide fine-grained access
control for object-oriented data bases.
We have, in collaboration with the Open Group
and with HP in Grenoble, worked on an effort to
standardize access to smart cards and other hardware tokens in the context of
Single Sign On. The generic layer is called Personal Security Module (PSM).
In collaboration with HP, we implemented PSM on HP-UX to enable the use of smart cards for
Unix applications needing authentication.
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