CIM_Account is the information held by a SecurityService to track identity and privileges managed by that service. Common ...

CIM_Account is the information held by a SecurityService to track identity and privileges managed by that service. Common examples of an Account are the entries in a UNIX /etc/passwd file. Several kinds of security services use various information from those entries - the /bin/login program uses the account name ('root') and hashed password to authenticate users, and the file service, for instance, uses the UserID field ('0') and GroupID field ('0') to record ownership and determine access control privileges on files in the file system. This class is defined so as to incorporate commonly-used LDAP attributes to permit implementations to easily derive this information from LDAP-accessible directories. 

The semantics of Account overlap with that of the class, CIM_Identity. However, aspects of Account - such as its specific tie to a System - are valuable and have been widely implemented. For this reason, the Account and Identity classes are associated using a subclass of LogicalIdentity (AccountIdentity), instead of deprecating the Account class in the CIM Schema. When an Account has been authenticated, the corresponding Identity's TrustEstablished Boolean would be set to TRUE. Then, the Identity class can be used as defined for authorization purposes.