Securing Your Business with Cisco ASA and PIX Firewalls

Defining Authentication

Authentication is a means to enforce a policy of who can access your network devices and who can access certain network services that traverse your security appliance, such as web, Telnet, and FTP. You can enforce authentication on both inbound and outbound users. When a user is authenticated, it means that the user has passed proper credentials, such as a username and password. Therefore, the user should be granted access to the service or device requested.

In today's Internet environment, you see authentication frequently. Two common examples of authentication are when users access their e-mail account and when users attempt to access a website for financial transactions. In both cases, users are prompted for both a ...