The Center for Information Technology Integration (CITI) is an applied research and development center, established in 1986 by the Regents of the University of Michigan as part of the Information Technology Division (ITD). CITI focuses on developing and integrating new computing technologies into the campus computing environment.

Research Projects involving a Windows NT platform at CITI include "NI_PAM: Pluggable Authentication Module for Windows NT" and "Provably secure video conferencing".

PAM for Windows NT: Our research goal is to provide flexibility and ease of development to Windows NT authentication system. WE achieved this by adding PAM-like pluggable authentication modules in GINA.

Provably secure video conferencing: Working with Bellcore, CITI implemented the Shoup-Rubin protocol on a tamper-resistant, commercial smartcard. To demonstrate the capabilities of our smartcard-based Shoup-Rubin implementation, we have built a standard interface to its functions, using the Internet standard Generic Security Service Application Program Interface (GSS-API). In this way, any GSS-API conforming application that issues a request to initialize a security context with a peer engages the Shoup-Rubin mechanism, and is provided with a session key shared with the peer. CITI has successfully demonstrated smartcard-based, provably secure videoconferencing that uses this prototype implementation. The code was ported to AIX 4.1, Windows NT and Windows 95.

Traditionally CITI was mainly a unix/mainframe shop but we are migrating towards NT. We use AFS for our distributed file server, but with the increase of PC's and the non availability of a reliable AFS client for PCs, some of our files are also served off of a NT server. Another major application which runs on a NT box is a Lotus Notes server. The Big Ten CIC Joint Projects web page https://btjp.citi.umich.edu/Big10.nsf?OpenDatabase is served off of a lotus notes server (running on a NT machine) through a domino server. We are hoping to build up a core group of programmers at CITI who are well versed with programming on Windows NT.

To learn more about CITI, see https://www.citi.umich.edu

Janani Janakiraman
Senior Systems Research Programmer,
CITI/ITD,
University of Michigan
e_mail: jej@umich.edu
Ph: (313)-764-2331
URL: https://www.citi.umich.edu/users/jej