Enabling the Internet White Pages Service -- the Directory Guardian

The Internet White Pages Service (IWPS) has been slow

to materialise for many reasons. One of them is the

security concerns that organisations have, over allowing

the public to gain access to either their Intranet or their

directory database. The Directory Guardian is a firewall

application proxy for X.500 and LDAP protocols that is

designed to alleviate these fears. Sitting in the firewall

system, it filters directory protocol messages passing into

and out of the Intranet, allowing security administrators

to carefully control the amount of directory information

that is released to the outside world. This paper describes

the design of our Guardian system, and shows how

relatively easy it is to configure its filtering capabilities.

Finally the paper describes the working demonstration of

the Guardian that was built for the 1997 World

Electronic Messaging Association directory challenge.

This linked the WEMA directory to the NameFLOWParadise

Internet directory, and demonstrated some of

the powerful filtering capabilities of the Guardian.