A Framework and Prototyping Environment for a W3 Security Architecture

The goal of this paper is to identify and describe the services necessary to build a secure corporate intranet and to show how prototypical implementations of these components can be realized to evaluate different approaches and configurations. The paper presents an architectural framework, which identifies the core services necessary for a secure Internet-based communication and information infrastructure. We focus on the authentication service, which is responsible for authenticating users and services. We then show how security infrastructures can be developed and tested using the rapid prototyping environment Wafe and the extensible Web browser Cineast. We explain how basic operations such as secure transfer and certificate acquisition can be realized and demonstrate the implementation of different certificate validation strategies.