The Development of a graduate course on identity management for the Department of Networking, Security, and Systems Administration

Abstract

Digital identities are being utilized more than ever as a means to authenticate computer users in order to control access to systems, web services, and networks. To maintain these digital identities, administrators turn to Identity Management solutions to offer protection for users, business partners, and networks. This paper proposes an analysis of Identity Management to be accomplished in the form of a graduate level course of study for a ten-week period for the Networking, Security, and Systems Administration department at Rochester Institute of Technology. This course will be designed for this department because of its emphasis on securing, protecting, and managing the identities of users within and across networks. Much of the security-related courses offered by the department focus primarily on security within enterprises. Therefore, Identity Management, a topic that is becoming more popular within enterprises each day, would compliment these courses. Students that enroll in this course will be more equipped to satisfy the needs of modern enterprises when they graduate because they will have a better understanding of how to address security issues that involve managing user identities across networks, systems, and enterprises. This course will focus on several aspects of Identity Management and its use in enterprises today. Covered during the course will be the frameworks of Identity Management, for instance, Liberty Identity Federation Framework and OASIS SAML 2.0; the Identity Management models; and some of the major Identity Management solutions that are in use today such as Liberty Alliance, Microsoft Passport, and Shibboleth. This course will also provide the opportunity to gain hands on experience by facilitating exemplar technologies used in laboratory investigations

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