Next: 8.2.4 Traffic control
Up: 8.2 Network security controls
Previous: 8.2.2 Access control
Authentication
of
host
systems
is
effective
against
the
following
threats:
- impersonation
of
servers
or
clients
(eventually
by
using
mutual
authentication
techniques)
- interception
or
modification
of
exchanged
data
- replay
of
previous
authentication
/
spoofing.
The
main
problems
with
distributed
systems
are
related
to
administration
and
key
management.
Keys
have
limited
lifetimes;
top
level
keys
in
authentication
systems
based
on
asymmetric
keys
have
to
be
exchanged
out-of-band8.1,
often
manually,
and
are
therefore
expensive.
Some
proposed
solutions
do
not
scale
very
well
to
large
networks
with
many
hosts.
Distributed
systems
are
hard
to
administer
securely
because
of
their
size
and
complexity.
Footnotes
- ...
out-of-band8.1
-
Using
a
different
communication
channel
(c) 1998, Filip Schepers