HP-UX AAA Server A.07.01 Release Notes

OATH is an industry-wide collaboration to develop open-reference architecture for
strong authentication. The OATH consortium has developed a set of open royalty-free
algorithms for one-time password authentication. The OATH standards-based OTP
authentication solution uses the HMAC sequence-based One-Time Password (HOTP)
algorithm to generate an OTP, using a secret key and a sequence counter.
The HP-UX AAA Server supports OATH standards HOTP algorithm to generate and
validate OTP, which enables the HP-UX AAA Server to interoperate with other
OATH-compliant HOTP algorithm-based OTP generators.
Normally, the authentication process used by the HP-UX AAA Server is confined to
validating the user password against the password stored in the database. However,
with OTP support, the HP-UX AAA Server can now perform the following additional
functions:
• Validate the OTP
• Proxy the OTP to another RADIUS server for OTP validation
• Generate OTP that can be delivered to target users through secondary channels
using e-mail, SMS, FTP and so on.
The OATH-based OTP authentication feature provides the HP-UX AAA Server with
the following benefits:
• Secures applications by providing an additional factor (OTP)
• Provides a low-cost solution for implementing OATH standards-based OTP
authentication
• Offers flexibility to configure OATH standards-based OTP authentication for
various deployment scenarios
• Provides compatibility with different types of OATH-compliant OTP generators
The OATH standards-based OTP authentication feature uses default FSM, and SQL
Access AATV and its components, such as database schema and sqlaccess.conf
files, client connector libraries for supported database clients, to retrieve and update
the token information from the SQL database to complete the OTP authentication. This
feature consists of a set of reference implementation files that provide a quick and easy
way to set up a working environment that provides fully functional reference
implementations for basic password and OATH standards-based OTP (two-factor)
authentication. Reference implementations can be used in their current states, or they
can customized to meet your deployment requirements.
8 HP-UX AAA Server A.07.01 Release Notes