HP CIFS Client A.01.09 Administrator's Guide, August 2003

Glossary 113
Glossary
A
ACL Access Control List, meta-data that
describes which users are allowed access to
file data and what type of access is granted
to that data. ACLs define access rights. In
this scheme, users typically belong to
"groups," and groups are given access rights
as a whole. Typical types of access rights are
read (list), write (modify), or create (insert).
Different file systems have varying levels of
ACL support and different file systems
define different access rights. For example,
DOS has only one set of rights for a file
(since only one user is considered to use a
DOS system). A POSIX 6-compliant file
system allows multiple rights to be assigned
to multiple files and directories for multiple
users and multiple groups of users.
Authentication Scheme to ensure that a
user who is accessing file data is indeed the
intended user. A secure networked file
system uses authentication toprevent access
occurring from someone pretending to be the
intended user.
C
CIFS Common Internet File System, a
specification for a file access protocol
designed for the Internet.
Credential A piece of information that
identifies a user. A credential may be as
simple as a number that is uniquely
associated with a user (like a social security
number), or it may be complicated and
contain additional identifying information. A
strong credential contains proof, sometimes
called a verifier, that the user of the
credential is indeed the actual user the
credential identifies.
E
Encryption Encryption ensures that data
is viewable only by those who possess a
secret (or private) key. Encrypted data is
meaningless unless the secret key is used to
decrypt the data. Encryption and decryption
of data is called ciphering.
K
Kerberos An authentication and
authorization security system developed by
MIT and the IETF working group. It is based
on secret key technology, and is generally
easier to manage than a public key
infrastructure because of its centralized
design. However, Kerberos is not as scalable
as a public key infrastructure.
S
Samba An open source product that first
appeared in the mid-1990's. Samba provides
NT file and print server capability for UNIX
systems, including most of the capabilities of
Advanced Server for UNIX, with the
exception of the Primary Domain Controller
(PDC) and Backup Domain Controller(BDC)
synchronization protocols. Although Samba
is widely used, vendor support for it is not
generally available.
SMB Server Message Block, the file-sharing
protocol at the heartof Windowsnetworking.
SMB is shared by Windows NT, Windows 95,
Windows for Workgroups, and OS/2 LAN
Manager. CIFS is essentially a renaming of
this protocol.