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CompTIA Security+ 1.2 CompTIA Security+ 4.6 NIST 800-53 IA-2 NIST 800-53 AC-3 NIST 800-53 AU-2
TechKnowSurge Catalog Interactives Authentication, Authorization or Accounting?
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Authentication, Authorization or Accounting?

Authentication, authorization or accounting? Sort moments from hotels, banks, libraries and offices into the three parts of AAA.

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About this interactive

AAA stands for authentication, authorization and accounting, and the AAA lesson gives each a plain job. Authentication: proving who you are. A password, a fingerprint, a smart card with its PIN or the answers to agreed questions all prove an identity. Authorization: deciding what you may reach once you are known. Which rooms a key card opens, which files you can change and which you can only read, how big a refund you may approve. Accounting: tracking what happens. The lesson's examples are server logs, data access logs, change logs, document versioning that keeps who changed what, and browser history. The lesson also notes that AAA and IAM overlap so much that people often use the terms for each other; in IAM, accounting is built into access management. TACACS+, RADIUS and Diameter are the protocols that carry AAA between network devices and their servers. A quick test for each card: is the system checking who someone is, deciding what they may do, or writing down what was done?

What you'll learn

Aligned to

CompTIA Security+
1.2 Summarize fundamental security concepts.
4.6 Given a scenario, implement and maintain identity and access management.
NIST 800-53
IA-2 Identification and Authentication (Organizational Users)
AC-3 Access Enforcement
AU-2 Event Logging

Key terms

Authentication
The process of verifying the identity of a user, device, or system.
Authorization
The process of determining what actions or resources an authenticated user is permitted to access.
Accounting
The tracking and logging of user activity, resource access, and system changes on a network for auditing and oversight purposes.
Identity and Access Management
IAM
A framework of policies and technologies that ensures the right users have appropriate access to resources.

Topics

Identity And Access Management Aaa Interactive Categorize

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