Access Management System - The collection of systems and services associated with specific on-line resources or services that together decide whether to grant a given individual access to those resources or services.
Assertion - The identity information provided by an Identity Provider to a Service Provider.
Attribute - A single piece of information associated with an electronic identity database record. Some attributes are general; others are personal. Some subset of all attributes defines a unique individual. Examples of an attribute are name, phone number, and group affiliation.
Attribute Assertion - A mechanism for associating specific attributes with a user.
Attribute Authority (AA) - The Shibboleth software service that asserts the requesting individual's attributes by creating an attribute assertion and then digitally signing it. The receiving online Service Provider must be able to validate this signature.
Attribute Authority Subject DN - The distinguished name of the Attribute Authority.
Attribute Authority URL - The Internet address of the Attribute Authority.
Attribute Release Policy (ARP) - Rules that an AA follows when deciding whether or not to release an attribute and its value(s)
Audit - An independent review and examination of a system's records and activities to determine the adequacy of system controls, ensure compliance with established security policy and procedures, detect breaches in security services, and recommend any changes that are indicated for countermeasures.
Authentication (AuthN) - The security measure by which a person transmits and validates his or her association with an electronic identifier. An example of authentication is submitting a password that is associated with a user account name.
Authorization (AuthZ) - The process for determining a specific person's eligibility to gain access to a resource or service, a right or permission granted to access an online system.
Billing Contact - The Billing Contact is responsible for executing and maintaining all of the Participant's financial transactions associated with its InCommon federation participation, including any necessary communication with its internal Executive and Administrative Contacts, and externally with federation accounting staff.
certificate - A digital representation of information which at least (1) identifies the certification authority issuing it, (2) names or identifies its Subscriber, (3) contains the Subscriber's public key, (4) identifies its operational period, and (5) is digitally signed by the certification authority issuing it.
Certificate Authority (CA) - A certificate authority (CA) is an authority in a network that issues and manages security credentials and public keys for message encryption.
Certificate Policy (CP) - A named set of rules that indicates the applicability of a certificate to a particular community and/or class of application with common security requirements. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3647.txt
Certificate Signing Request (CSR) - A digital file which contains a user's name and public key. The user sends the CSR to a Certificate Authority (CA)
to be converted into a certificate.
Certification Practice Statement (CPS) - A statement of the practices that a certification authority employs in issuing, managing, revoking, and renewing or re-keying certificates. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3647.txt
digital signature - A digital signature is an electronic signature that can be used to authenticate the identity of the sender of a message, or of the signer of a document. It can also be used to ensure that the original content of the message or document that has been conveyed is unchanged.
directory - A directory is a specialized database that may contain information about an institution's membership, groups, roles, devices, systems, services, locations, and other resources.
Distinguished Name (DN) - Distinguished names are string representations that uniquely identify users, systems, and organizations. In general, DNs are used in LDAP-compliant directories. In certificate management systems, DNs are u