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Relative Distinguished Name A Relative Distinguished Name (RDN) doesn’t need to be a wholly unique value as long as there are no duplicates within the organizational unit (OU). As such, an RDN is the portion of the name that is unique within its container.

User Principal Name A User Principal Name (UPN) is often referred to as a friendly name. It consists of the user account and the user’s domain name and is used to identify the user (think of an e-mail address).

Canonical Name The Canonical Name (CN) is the DN given in a top-down notation.

X.500

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU), an international standards group for directory services in the late 1980s, implemented the X.500 standard, which was the basis for later models of directory structure such as LDAP. The major problem in the industry implementing a full-blown X.500 structure revolved around the complexity of the implementation. Novell was one of the first manufacturers to implement X.500 in its NetWare NDS product.

eDirectory

eDirectory is the backbone for new Novell networks. It stores information on all system resources and users and any other relevant information about systems attached to a NetWare server. eDirectory is an upgrade and replacement for NDS, and it has gained wide acceptance in the community.

Databases and Technologies

One key reason computers are installed is for their ability to store, access, and modify data. The primary tool for data management is the database. Databases have become increasingly more sophisticated, and their capabilities have grown dramatically over the last 10 years. This growth has created opportunities to view data in new ways; it has also created problems for both designers and users of these products.

This section briefly discusses database technologies and some of the common issues associated with vulnerabilities in database systems.

The relational database has become the most common approach to database implementation. This technology allows data to be viewed in dynamic ways based on the user’s or administrator’s needs. The most common language used to speak to databases is called Structured Query Language (SQL). SQL allows queries to be configured in real time and passed to database servers. This flexibility causes a major vulnerability when it isn’t implemented securely.

Don’t confuse the acronym SQL with Microsoft’s database product SQL Server. SQL Server implements Structured Query Language, or SQL, as do most other databases.

For instance, you might want to get the phone numbers of all the customers who live in a certain geographic area and have purchased products from you in the last two years. In a manual system, you would first need to determine which customers live in the area you want. You would perform a manual search of customer records, and then you would identify which customers have made purchases. This type of process could be very involved and time consuming.

In a relational database environment, you could query the database to find all records that meet your criteria and then print them. The command to do this might be a single line of code, or it might require thousands of instructions. Obviously, the increase in productivity is a worthwhile investment.

Corporate or organizational data is one of an organization’s most valuable possessions. It usually resides either in desktop systems or in large centralized database servers. This information makes the servers tempting targets for industrial espionage and damage.

Database servers suffer from all the vulnerabilities we’ve discussed to this point. Additionally, the database itself is a complex set of programs that work together to provide access to data.

Early database systems connected the end user directly to the data through applications programs. These programs were intended to allow easy data access and to allow transactions to be performed against the database. In a private network, physical security was usually all that was needed to protect the data.

As the Internet has