A provider of microprocessor cards and point-of-sale terminals with a dominant presence in markets such as telecom, public telephony, finance, retail, transport, entertainment, healthcare, personal identification, information technology and public sector.

The access client software represented the backbone supporting the customer's smart cards on diverse operating systems, functionalities and standards, and compatible authentication. It had become imperative for our customer to subsume existing co-admin and co-user tools into a new Windows/Linux-based, diagnostic utility. The utility would implement authentication policies such as user logon, user logoff, password changing and SAS reading, in Windows NT. Creating user authentication systems in Windows NT is hard work, for UNIX is unfamiliar with concepts like DLL (dynamic linking library) and graphic interface for networked authentication program (GINA). Also, part of the user logon program lies embedded in Windows NT operating system.

The Solution

Our solution worked by investing Windows NT authentication system with flexibility and development -ease . This it did by enriching GINA with pluggable authentication modules (PAM). Underpinning our solution were technologies such as VC++, UNIX, LINUX, plus all flavors of Windows.

Apart from cost arbitrage, our solution e nhanced the access client software clearing the decks for its deployment across multiple operating systems/platforms in manifold ways.