There are five types of UW NetIDs. Each type has a different set of acceptable uses and policies associated with them. If you are using UW NetID authentication in your application it is important to understand each type and be educated about what types you allow into your application.

Personal UW NetIDs

Personal UW NetIDs are owned by a single person. These UW NetIDs are an individual's key to online resources at the UW. A person's primary personal UW NetID will stay with them for life, however, their primary netid can change at the request of the UW NetID owner. The person UW NetID policies can be found at www.washington.edu/computing/uwnetid.

Shared UW NetIDs

Shared UW NetIDs can be used by one or more people. A shared UW NetID allows group access to computing services provided by C&C such as web publishing and email. New services leveraging Shared UW NetIDs should use Personal UW NetID authentication to access these resources.

Reserved UW NetIDs

Certain IDs in the UW NetID namespace should not be allowed to authenticate for a number of reasons. Some such reasons include:

• The UW NetID has privilidged access in a lot of systems (netids like "root" and "system" for example).
• The @u.washington.edu forwarding space is being used for another service such as mailman.

Temporary UW NetIDs

Temporary UW NetIDs allow individuals to have temporary access to general access resources. These IDs get assigned a password for a duration of time after which the password is removed and the ID is assigned a new password and may be used by a different individual or set of individuals.

Application UW NetIDs

Application UW NetIDs are intended for use by applications to authenticate in situations where cert authentication is not available. They mirror the guidelines of UW CA assigned Certificates.