Establishing and maintaining a presence on the World Wide Web (Web), once a sideline for U.S. industry, has become a key strategic aspect of marketing and sales. Many companies have demonstrated that a well designed Web site can have a positive effect on their profitability. Enabling customers to... See full abstract

Establishing and maintaining a presence on the World Wide Web (Web), once a sideline for U.S. industry, has become a key strategic aspect of marketing and sales. Many companies have demonstrated that a well designed Web site can have a positive effect on their profitability. Enabling customers to answer their own questions by clicking their way through Web pages, instead of dealing with operators and voice response systems, increases the efficiency of the customer interface. One of the most challenging problems in managing large networked systems is the complexity of security administration. This is particularly true for organizations that are attempting to manage security in distributed multimedia environments such as those using World Wide Web services. Today, security administration is costly and prone to error because administrators usually specify access control lists for each user on the system individually.
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