Retrofitting Network Security to Third-Party Applications -- The SecureBase Experience

Systems such as Kerberos, designed to provide secure user and service authentication over insecure open networks, continue to gain acceptance in the UNIX world. There are both freely available and commercial products which reduce the vulnerabilities inherent in trusting "traditional" UNIX security in a distributed environment. However, such products generally do not provide similar protection for third-party applications which have their own network security paradigms. This paper show how such protection can be extended to encompass SYBASE, a widely-used distributed database system. The experience with SYBASE is generalized to other network applications.