7.1.1 What is SESAME?

Linda Gricius (March, 1998):

SESAME (a Secure European System for Applications in a Multi-vendor Environment) is a research and development project, partly funded by the European Commission under its RACE program. It is also the name of the technology that came out of that project.

SESAME is a construction kit - it is a set of security infrastructure components for product developers. In a nutshell, SESAME:

• supports single sign-on to the network;
• provides role based distributed access control using digitally signed Privilege Attribute Certificates, with optional controlled delegation of access rights;
• supports full cryptographic protection of exchanges between users and remote applications;
• supports multiple domain operation with different security policies;
• can be scaled to operate over very large networks through its use of public key technology;
• builds on work done in international standards - it is an Open Systems solution;
• uses the widely accepted Generic Security Service API (GSS-API) - the SESAME user gets mechanism transparency.