IBM Enterprise Identity Mapping (EIM) is a framework from

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

that allows the mapping of different identities (user IDs) on various platforms, user repositories and applications to a single identity. It can be used with a range of authentication mechanisms such as

Kerberos (protocol) Kerberos () is a computer-network authentication protocol that works on the basis of ''tickets'' to allow nodes communicating over a non-secure network to prove their identity to one another in a secure manner. Its designers aimed it primarily ...

(e.g. as used by MS

Active Directory Active Directory (AD) is a directory service developed by Microsoft for Windows domain networks. Windows Server operating systems include it as a set of processes and services. Originally, only centralized domain management used Active Direct ...

) to allow one user repository to authenticate the user and for this information to be passed via a secure token to another platform for authorisation even when the User IDs differ. The target platform refers to EIM to obtain the mapping identity for its own repository. In this way it enables single sign-on. It is sometimes possible to eliminate passwords on the target system. It is available free of charge on all IBM server platforms including those running

z/OS z/OS is a 64-bit operating system for IBM z/Architecture mainframes, introduced by IBM in October 2000. It derives from and is the successor to OS/390, which in turn was preceded by a string of MVS versions.Starting with the earliest: ...

IBM i IBM i (the ''i'' standing for ''integrated'') is an operating system developed by IBM for IBM Power Systems. It was originally released in 1988 as OS/400, as the sole operating system of the IBM AS/400 line of systems. It was renamed to i5/OS in 2 ...

IBM AIX AIX (pronounced ) is a series of Proprietary software, proprietary Unix operating systems developed and sold by IBM since 1986. The name stands for "Advanced Interactive eXecutive". Current versions are designed to work with Power ISA based ...

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

PowerLinux PowerLinux is the combination of a Linux-based operating system (OS) running on PowerPC- or Power ISA-based computers from IBM. It is often used in reference along with ''Linux on Power'', and is also the name of several Linux-only IBM Power System ...

and

Windows Server Windows Server (formerly Windows NT Server) is a brand name for Server (computing), server-oriented releases of the Windows NT operating system (OS) that have been developed by Microsoft since 1993. The first release under this brand name i ...

plus earlier releases such as i5/OS. In the case of

both EIM and Kerberos authentication are an integral part of the OS.

References

* * {{cite web , title=Enterprise Identity Mapping , url=https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/i/7.2?topic=security-enterprise-identity-mapping , website=IBM Documentation , access-date=18 September 2023 , date=14 April 2021 IBM software