How is DACS different? What requirements does it meet?
DACS takes a decidedly pragmatic approach to authentication, managing identities, and access control. Organizations are usually unable or unwilling to make any but minor changes to their computing environment, existing applications, and web services, whether for financial or political reasons, lack of qualified personnel, or because of other concerns. The additional administrative overhead incurred by a new software system is often a significant impediment to its use. The DACS framework recognizes these facts and strives to minimize the cost of adopting and administering DACS and participating in a federation. DACS was originally devised as a system that would: • Facilitate the cooperation of autonomous organizations to control access to information services delivered through web-based access methods; • Define a common syntax and semantics for identifying users; • Define a common syntax and semantics for jurisdictions to specify access to their information services, with the resulting
