Security consists of authentication, and authorization. Authentication determines who the entity requesting service is. Authorization determines if the authenticated entity has a right to request the service it has requested.
The NSCLDAQ security software helps your application to perform simple authentication and authorization according to policies set by your application. The NSCLDAQ security software is not a high security system. It is primarily intended to avoid errors on multi users data taking systems. It is not intended to secure against malicious attacks.
The assumption is that your data acquisition system is already secured, from unauthorized users either by living behind a firewall, or by security management in the system itself.
Two class hierarchies work together to do authentication. Authenticators, and Interactors. Interactors accept authentication credentials from some source (credentials are anything that identify an entity within some authentication scheme). Authenticators examine those credentials to determine if they are legitimate.
In order to incorporate this software into your application you will need to include various header files. The reference section for each class describes the headers you need. The headers live in the include subdirectory of the nscldaq installation. Suppose you have an environment variable DAQROOT defined that points to the top level directory of the NSCL DAQ installation (at the NSCL, this is /usr/opt/daq/someversion where someversion is the version installed), to compile modules that include headers from this library you must:
At link time, you must link the security library into your application. To do this you must supply switches to help the linker locate the library at both link and run time, as the library is typically a shared library. For example: