Understand identities, authentication, and authorization
Separate who or what an identity is from how it signs in and what it can access.
- Distinguish identity, authentication, authorization, and accounting.
Identity and Access Management (IAM) is the set of people, processes, and systems used to manage identities and their access. Identification says which identity is being claimed. Authentication checks evidence for that claim. Authorization decides what the authenticated identity may do. Accounting records relevant activity. IAM covers human users, services, devices, and other principals.
A small example
1identity = "analyst-17"
2authenticated = True
3permission = "reports:read"
4print(identity, "may use", permission, "=" , authenticated)analyst-17 may use reports:read = True
Authentication and authorization solve different problems: a successful sign-in does not imply access to every resource. Make authorization decisions for a specific action and resource, using current policy and context. Logs help answer what happened, but should avoid collecting unnecessary secrets.
Key takeaways
Distinguish identity, authentication, authorization, and accounting.
Treat access as a lifecycle: grant deliberately, review regularly, and revoke promptly.
Lesson quiz
5 questions · pass with 4 correct · up to 50 XP
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