
SABSA Practitioner: Architecture & Design
Module PT1: SABSA Identity and Access Management Architecture - Course Content
1. Basic Concepts and Components for I&AM from the SABSA Matrix
- Naming schemes and standards: Unique names; aliases; X.500 and LDAP; authorisation and the concept of credentials
- Cryptographic concepts and services for I&AM: ciphers; symmetric and asymmetric algorithms; keys, encryption; data authentication and integrity protection techniques; digital signatures and non-repudiation
- Authentication exchange mechanisms; cryptographic key management principles and models; cryptographic services architectures; relative strengths of cryptographic algorithms; concept of information entropy
- Personal authentication: passwords, tokens and biometrics; multi-factor strong authentication; matching password entropy to cryptographic key entropy in client systems; password management good practice
- Security lifetimes and deadlines applied in I&AM: time-outs, passwords, cryptographic keys and certificates; time-stamps and currency of data
- Finite state machines: modelling entity interactions; applications in the design of access management protocols; application for cryptographic, handshaking and authentication protocols
2. Identity and Access Management (I&AM) Strategy
- Goals of I&AM; business drivers for I&AM
- SABSA Business Attributes Profiling for I&AM
- Control objectives for I&AM
3. Entity Relationships and Trust
- Security entities, relationships and trust; SABSA trust modelling; one-way, two-way and transitive trust models; SABSA analysis of complex trust models; trust broker models
- Protecting trust-relationships: applying public key technology to I&AM; trusted third party registration and certification; the components of a PKI; planning a PKI strategy
- Registration and enrolment: registration authorities and policies; strength of registration processes; authorisation and role assignment; levels of trust
4. I&AM Policy
- Goals of I&AM policy; SABSA security policy architecture related to I&AM policy; I&AM policy principles
- Security domains, domain owners and domain policies; security domain policy authority; sub-domains, super-domains; inter-domain relationships and shared policy negotiation; isolated domains, independent domains. Interaction rules, agreed security services and mechanisms
- Security policies and classification applied to I&AM: classification of information and of systems; access policy management; owners, users and custodians; I&AM policy management in outsourcing
- Trust in domains: security associations; trusted entities; conditional and unconditional trust, transitive trust; logical and physical domains; multi-domain environments; domain interaction; applying the security domain concepts to application security and network security; VPNs and firewalls; extended application domains
5. Conceptual logical and physical I&AM architectures
- I&AM in the SABSA layered infrastructure reference architecture. I&AM services; SABSA I&AM service management architecture: managing I&AM services and securing service management
- High-level overview of XML and related security standards for I&AMt: web services architecture; XML schema, XML encryption and digital signature; SOAP and its extensions;.S2ML and SAML; WS-security; XACML; XML security issues; XML firewalls
- Access control: concepts and architectures; role-based access control; SABSA central access management architectures; decoupling the user from the target application using roles; context based access control
- Overview of discretionary and mandatory access control; formal access control models; controlling access to files, file directories and databases; user account management; default user accounts; system-level privilege management; third party access management; emergency access management
- Entity authentication exchange: concepts and logical architecture models as in ISO/IEC 10181; authentication of users, devices, sessions and messages. Non-repudiation
- Overview of access management technologies and standards: SSL & TLS; SecureID; Kerberos; Project Sesame; IPSec; DNSSec; SASL and SASL2
- Federated I&AM: SAML2; Liberty Alliance Project; WS-Federation; federated PKI
- Security administration and provisioning: access monitoring and audit trails; physical access controls; personnel security management; segregation of duties
6. Directory services architecture
- SABSA directory services reference model; directory services management; directory objects, entities and entity classes; entity attributes; directory hierarchical structures, inheritance and transitivity; security equivalence
- SABSA reference architectures for a directory and associated access management services
- Directory service information model; naming model; functional model; security model
- Entity schemas; role associations; authorisation, privilege profiles; credentials; certificates and tickets