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Front cover - IBM Redbooks

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222 Lotus Security Handbook<br />

A final word about anonymous access. If a user is in a hierarchical certification<br />

environment and attempts to connect to a server which is set for anonymous<br />

access, and the server can't authenticate the user, that person will see the<br />

following message in the status bar:<br />

Server X cannot authenticate you because: the server's Address Book does not<br />

contain any cross-certificates capable of authenticating you. You are now<br />

accessing that server anonymously.<br />

6.1.11 Data integrity with digital signatures<br />

At the beginning of the book, we discussed the security services that need to be<br />

provided. One of the them is data integrity, which is the topic of this section.<br />

When databases are replicated or e-mail messages are routed through the<br />

network, there is the risk that they could be modified, either because of a<br />

hardware fault, or because of the actions of an unauthorized third party<br />

(commonly referred to as tampering). Because of these risks, it must be possible<br />

to tell whether the data received is the same, or in the same state, as the original<br />

version that was sent.<br />

In order to detect any such changes, digital signatures are used. Data integrity<br />

implies the current condition of the data is equal to the original “pure” condition. It<br />

guarantees that information is not changed in transit. A digital signature can<br />

verify that the person who originated the data is the author and that no one has<br />

tampered with the data.<br />

Originators can add their digital signature to e-mail messages and can also add<br />

their signature to fields or sections of Notes documents.<br />

Note: A database designer controls whether or not fields and sections of a<br />

database are signable. Given this facility, individual users can then choose<br />

whether to sign mail messages or not.<br />

For Digital signatures applied by the Notes client, the same RSA key pair is used<br />

that was used in the validation and authentication process. The manner in which<br />

digital signatures are used in Lotus Notes is illustrated in Figure 6-15 on<br />

page 223.

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