Secure Global Desktop Administration Guide > Users and authentication > Secure Global Desktop and user authentication

Secure Global Desktop and user authentication

Because Sun Secure Global Desktop Software has a three-tier architecture, there are two stages to user authentication:

1. Users authenticate to a Secure Global Desktop server in order to log in to their webtop.
2. Users authenticate to a application server in order to run an application.

Authenticating to a Secure Global Desktop server

The Secure Global Desktop server supports two mechanisms for authenticating users:

• web server/third party authentication in which an external mechanism (typically a web server) authenticates the user and the Secure Global Desktop server trusts that the authentication is correct.
• login authorities in which Secure Global Desktop tries to authenticate the users credentials against one or more external authentication services, for example an LDAP directory.

These mechanisms allow you to integrate Secure Global Desktop with your existing authentication architecture.

The main results of a successful authentication are:

• a user identity, which is the Secure Global Desktop idea of who a user is; and
• a login profile, which determines the user's Secure Global Desktop-related settings including webtop content.

Sometimes, but not always, the user's identity and their login profile are the same thing.

Authenticating to an application server

Secure Global Desktop uses login scripts to handle the connection to an application server, the authentication process and to start the application.

Secure Global Desktop can store the user's credentials for an application server in a secure password cache so they don't need to type them more than once.

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