The Cisco APIC must be configured to use at least two authentication servers for the purpose of authenticating users prior to granting administrative access.

Centralized management of authentication settings increases the security of remote and nonlocal access methods. This control is particularly important protection against the insider threat. With robust centralized management, audit records for administrator account access to the organization's Cisco ACIs can be more readily analyzed for trends and anomalies. The alternative method of defining administrator accounts on each device exposes the device configuration to remote access authentication attacks and system administrators with multiple authenticators for each Cisco ACI.

APIC policies manage the authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA) functions of the Cisco ACI fabric. The combination of user privileges, roles, and domains with access rights inheritance enables administrators to configure AAA functions at the managed object level in a granular fashion. Creating a user and assigning a role to that user does not enable access rights. It is necessary to also assign the user to one or more security domains. By default, the ACI fabric includes two special pre-created domains:
- "All" allows access to the entire MIT.
- "Infra" allows access to fabric infrastructure objects/subtrees, such as fabric access policies.

Satisfies: SRG-APP-000149-NDM-000247, SRG-APP-000001-NDM-000200