The following topics present a few background concepts that are useful for understanding the discussions of authentication in this topic:
· Principals, which are the subjects of authentication
· The shared-secret authentication protocol, which is the mechanism by which authentication is effected when applications specify this protocol via the authenticated RPC facility
· Cells, which are the environment in which authentication takes place
· Protection levels, which are the various degrees to which transmitted application-level data may be protected
· Data encryption/decryption (cryptographic) algorithms, which are the mechanisms that the security server and client and server runtimes use to encrypt and decrypt data exchanged between principals
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The Shared-Secret Authentication Protocol