## Purpose and Organization of the Security Topics

This part of the guide explains the major features of DCE security so that you can decide what, if anything, you need to do to ensure that your DCE application is sufficiently secure. A lot of security is built into DCE, so in many cases you will need to do nothing, or very little, to secure your DCE application. Furthermore, you do not need to understand all of the details of the DCE security services in order to use them effectively.

Following the overview of the DCE Security Service in this topic are two topics that contain conceptual discussions of authentication and authorization. The remaining topics in this part of the guide discuss the DCE Security Service APIs - registry, login, extended registry attribute (ERA), extended privilege attribute (EPA), key management, access control list (ACL), password management, and ID map - and GSS credentials.

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