Unified Identity Authentication In Power Information System: Research And Application

In addition to the rapid growth of hard assets, Shanghai Electric Power Co., a power transmission, distribution and sales corporation, also built an extensive and valuable information management system and a network security system for compliance management. However, as the importance of the company's centralized applications and the demand on security increase, the original approach focusing on security at the border no longer meets the business- and application-level security needs.Currently, user identity management and authentication is done separately within individual business systems. At the same time, the scope of users for application systems is extending to include external users outside the power company, such as application developers, network maintenance contractors, as well as other temporary users. The rapid increase in the number of business systems and the number of system users exacerbate the pitfall of the current identity management approach. Authentication and management is not a new problem, but as the security boundary changes, security issues due to identity management vulnerabilities now pose greater threats to the entire system.This article propose to address the above problem with a unified authentication platform, on top of the existing power information management system. ISO27001 risk assessment and gap analysis is then applied to the Shanghai electric power information management system to produce in-depth analysis for the practical aspects of identity management. Based on the analysis, the overall design of the unified authentication platform framework is conducted according to information security management standards. The platform framework includes identity management, centralized authentication, single point of login, centralized authorization, centralized auditing and other key modules. Finally, an approach is created to integrate the unified authentication platform with existing application systems of the power information management system, through analyzing the application systems in detail. As the result, the research in this article provides a systematic, effective and reliable identity management solution for the Shanghai electric power information management system.