| Technical Study |
|---|
| Security in Federated Naming |
| X/Open Document Number: E605 |
©February 1997, The Open Group All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.
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The Open Group is an international open systems organization that is leading the way in creating the infrastructure needed for the development of network-centric computing and the information superhighway. Formed in 1996 by the merger of the X/Open Company and the Open Software Foundation, The Open Group is supported by most of the world's largest user organizations, information systems vendors and software suppliers. By combining the strengths of open systems specifications and a proven branding scheme with collaborative technology development and advanced research, The Open Group is well positioned to assist user organizations, vendors and suppliers in the development and implementation of products supporting the adoption and proliferation of open systems.
With more than 300 member companies, The Open Group helps the IT industry to advance technologically while managing the change caused by innovation. It does this by:
The Open Group operates in all phases of the open systems technology lifecycle including innovation, market adoption, product development and proliferation. Presently, it focuses on seven strategic areas: open systems application platform development, architecture, distributed systems management, interoperability, distributed computing environment, security, and the information superhighway. The Open Group is also responsible for the management of the UNIX trade mark on behalf of the industry.
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This leads to the preparation of a Product Standard which is the name used for the documentation that records the conformance requirements (and other information) to which a vendor may register a product. There are currently two forms of Product Standard, namely the Profile Definition and the Component Definition, although these will eventually be merged into one.
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Preliminary Specifications are analogous to the trial-use standards issued by formal standards organizations, and developers are encouraged to develop products on the basis of them. However, experience through implementation work may result in significant (possibly upwardly incompatible) changes before its progression to becoming a CAE Specification. While the intent is to progress Preliminary Specifications to corresponding CAE Specifications, the ability to do so depends on consensus among Open Group members.
The Open Group publishes specifications on behalf of industry consortia. For example, it publishes the NMF SPIRIT procurement specifications on behalf of the Network Management Forum. It also publishes Technology Specifications relating to OSF/1, DCE, OSF/Motif and CDE.
Technology Specifications (formerly AES Specifications) are often candidates for consensus review, and may be adopted as CAE Specifications, in which case the relevant Technology Specification is superseded by a CAE Specification.
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Readers may also be interested to refer to:
Readers may refer to the IETF WWW site (http://www.ietf.org) to access further information on these Internet drafts.
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