
© Copyright IBM Corp. 2012. All rights reserved. 41
Chapter 3. Authentication: Who has access
Authentication is the process of proving the identity of the user who (or even another
computer system which) is requesting access to software.
The most common type of authentication is, of course, the userid and password. But there are
other methods of authenticating to a server. Simply put, here are three categories of
authentication:
What you know - passwords, session IDs
What you have - digital certificates, hardware passcode generators
What you are - biometrics such as fingerprints and retinal scans
For each of these types of authentication, one ...