IJCSS-408
IJCSS-408
IJCSS-408
ABSTRACT
In computer science distributed systems could be more secured with a distributed trust model based on either PKI
or Kerberos. However, it becomes difficult to establish trust relationship across heterogeneous domains due to
different actual trust mechanism and security policy as well as the intrinsic flaw of each trust model. Since Internet
has been used commonly in information systems technologies, many applications need some security capabilities
to protect against threats to the communication of information. Two critical procedures of these capabilities are
authentication and authorization. This report presents a strong authentication and authorization model using three
standard frameworks. They are PKI, PMI, and Directory. The trust in this approach is enabled by the use of public
key infrastructure (PKI) which is applied for client two-factor authentication and secures the infrastructure. We
introduce the preventive activity-based authorization policy for dynamic user privilege controls. It helps prevent
successive unauthorized requests in a formal manner. At the core, we apply An Improved Trust Model to facilitate
the authentication with the different keys with work flow of model efficiently. Also describes the X.509 standard to
define the directory schemas of PKI and PMI to find the object classes and optional attributes.
1. INTRODUCTION
PKI and Kerberos are two protocols, into which most of the researches in the field of a distributed system are
made, and they have got the most widely application. In a PKI protocol, the information security of that system is
assured through the adoption of public key technology and digital certificate. The purpose of the digital certificate
is to verify the identity of the certificate holder.
Kerberos, based on symmetrical key algorithm, enables the establishment of mutual trust between the two
communication sides through session key and ticket authorization. Both protocols, to a certain degree, have been
put into application with relatively good results. Net technology are continuously advancing, especially a huge
number of large-scale distributed information systems are setting up, which may adopt different authentication
technology and its corresponding trust model, as a result, though its own system security is safeguarded,
numerous authentication barriers and “information isolate islands” in a network will be also created.
PKI provides a framework to verify the identities of each entities of given domain. The framework includes the
requesting, issuing, signing, and validating of the public-key certificates.
PMI provides a framework to determine whether or not they are authorized to access a specific resource. The
framework includes the issuance and validation of attribute certificates. Public -key certificates are certificates for
trusting public-key and attribute certificates are certificates for trusting privilege attribute.
Directory plays a significant role as an interconnection standard for PKI and PMI. This report describes the form of
authentication and authorization information held by the Directory, and how such information may be obtained
from Directory.
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the certificate expires. If an authority revokes a public -key certificate, users need to be able to know that
revocation has occurred so they no longer use the revoked certificate.
A system using a public-key certificate needs to validate a certificate prior to using that certificate for an
application. Since certificates are public information, certificates can be published and placed in public places
Directory), with out special efforts to protect them.
The advantage of method ‘a’ is that a user’s private key is never released to another entity. But, the user needs a
communication with the CA so that he can transfer the public key and distinguished name in a secure manner. In
case of ‘b’ and ‘c’, the user’s private key also needs to be transferred to the user in a secure manner.
Generally a CRL is published within an X.500 directory which also stores the certificates for the particular CA
domain. Delta-CRL is a partial CRL which is a list of only newly revoked certificates. Delta-CRL is useful when
entire revocation list become large and unwieldy. An Authority Revocation List (ARL) is a CRL that is used
exclusively to publish revocation information for CAs. It therefore does not contain any revocation information
pertaining to end -user certificates.
A certification path logically forms an unbroken chain of trusted points between two users wishing to authenticate.
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Root CA is the unique trust-point. If the root CA is rendered into unreliable, the trust relationship of the whole PKI
system will be destroyed right away. It is almost impossible to recover the whole trust relationship. In practical
network environment, it is hard to establish an exactly dependable trust-point. It is not even an easy thing to
integrate established CAs due to different security policies. Any adjust to the trust relationship would be extremely
difficult once a system is established.
Security weakness of a single CA or a number of CAs will not affect the overall operations of the whole system,
because the trust can be reestablished through other paths. It is also easier to renew the trust relationship after
malfunction or accidents, only a few CAs or users will be affected. It is a complex and difficult thing to construct a
certificate verification path, because there may be many possibilities. The user may try many times to find the
proper one. With the increase of CAs, cross trust authentication would become more complex and a heavier
burden would be imposed on the management and maintenance of the system. This model is not appropriate to
the organizations with strict affiliation, such as the government and the military. Hierarchic relationship of the real
entities could not be reflected by this model.
The Bridge CA plays a role as a third part sponsor for establishing the trust relationship between different
domains. The independent and surveillant status of the Bridge CA is suitable to maintain reliability and
seriousness of the model. This model has a wheel-shaped and radiating structure as well as multiple trust chains
of many other trust models. The Bridge CA does not manage the end-users, so the change of the user number
does not affect it. Using this model, the number of the times of certificate authenticating will be the same as the
number of CAs, which could make the management less costly and much easier. When the Bridge CA is
disabled, every CA connected with the bridge only needs to release the certificate signed to the Bridge CA. They
can still work separately before the Bridge CA returns to work.
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4. KERBEROS
Kerberos is a network authentication protocol. It was designed to provide strong authentication based on the
reliable third-party authentication system for the project Athena. Now, it is available in many commercial products.
Kerberos builds a safe bridge between client and server by providing central authentication service and
symmetrical key system. In other words, an appointed server works for the user only when the central
authentication server validates the service request and access right sued by the user. The most important part of
Kerberos is the key distribution centre, which called KDC for short. It provides two services, one is AS
(Authentication service), and the other is TGS (Ticket granting service). The operation flowchart of the protocol is
demonstrated in Fig.1.
Kerberos protocol is now widely used in the distributed network applications. Independent development platform,
high speed communication of authentication, mutual authentication between entities and transferable relation-ship
of trust, and a relatively strong compatibility with heterogeneous domains which may adopt various trust polices,
are all the predominance of the Kerberos. However, many security flaws appear during its usage in that the
protocol heavily relied on certain aspects when it was designed and the limitation is quite striking. From the point
of view of the network attack, some serious problems demanding more attention are as followed:
AS TGS
(Authentication (Ticket granting
Server) Server)
1 2 3 4
5
C S
Client 6 (Application
Server)
FIGURE1: Model of Kerberos Protocol
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In fact, the attacker can easily fabricate a message according to the protocol format beforehand. Once he
intercepts and captures the ticket from the user to server, the attacker could send the fake message within 5
minutes; server can not easily find what exactly happened.
Naturally, the KDC becomes the targets of the attackers. Especially for the government or the military, it will be a
disaster if the KDC has been destroyed which will result in failed communication among users of the domain. It is
also quite demanding to store the system. So Kerberos, the authentication and authorization protocol based on
symmetric key algorithm, is fitter with the environment which does not own a large number of registered users, but
demands high efficiency.
CA 1
D
O A
M S
A K
U D
I S
N C
E T
R G
1
S
SERVER
CA 2
[ DOMAIN 2
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5.1.2 AS→U: PKU (KU, TGS, KAS, TGS (TU, TGS), PKTGS)
AS→U: When AS decrypt the request, he gets the CertU and verifies the user’s identity. If AS can make sure the
request sender is unquestionable the one asserted, AS generates the session key KU, TGS which will be used for
the communication of the user and TGS. The response to the user from AS will be encrypted by PKU (user’s
public key). The response contains the session key KU, TGS, the ticket ZU, TGS which will be encrypted by KAS,
TGS shared only by AS and TGS.
• The model uses Kerberos protocol for the authentication between domains, greatly cutting down time
waste and resource waste on building and verifying the certificate path, which is a disadvantage of the old
PKI model.
• The trust between domains is built on the validity of the ticket, which is issued by the KDC of the Kerberos
system. The format and content of the ticket is much more fixed than the certificate based on X.509. In
this way, valid certificate regarded as invalid due to its different format will be avoided during the process
of authentication.
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• The Kerberos system would only store the session keys with which to communicate with CAs of different
domains, rather than generate or maintain a large number of session keys for the users.
• The Kerberos server is only responsible for setting up cross-domain communication and granting tickets,
while any addition or reduction to the number of the users or authentication registration falls to the CA’s
Obligation. Users in different domains follow the different security policies based on PKI. Each domain’
CA takes the responsibility of user management, such as user’s registration, increasing or decreasing a
member. This model not only lightens the burden of the system, but will not affect or depend on the
domains’ architecture which might be different because of various working styles. When the KDC is under
attack or fails to work properly, it will not cause trouble to the inter-domain management and
communication.
• How the KDC distributes or isochronously updates the session keys to the CAs is not included, as proper
answers could be found in the field of security requirement of the actual system.
The use of attribute certificates, issued by an Attribute Authorities (AA) provides a flexible Privilege Management
Infrastructure (PMI) which can be established and managed independently from a PKI. At the same time, there is
a relationship between the two infrastructures. Since PMI doesn’t provide the mechanism to trust certificate
holder’s identity, PKI is used to authenticate identities of issuers and holders in attribute certificates.
PMI framework support privilege delegation as an optional feature. SOA assigns privilege to an entity that is
permitted to also act as an AA and further delegate the privilege. Delegation may continue through several
intermediaries AA’s until it is ultimately assigned to an end -entity that cannot further delegate that privilege. The
attribute certificate extension provide one mechanism that can be used by an SOA to make privilege attribute
definitions and associated domination rules available to privilege verifiers.
An attribute certificate that contains this extension is called an attribute descriptor certificate and is a special type
of attribute certificate.
Directory schema:
A directory schema specifies the types of objects that a directory may have and the mandatory and optional
attributes of each object type. The schema is made up of two things: object classes, and attributes. Following
definitions of object classes and attributes are cited from Netscape Directory Administration Guide.
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Object Classes
Object classes define the types of attributes an entry can contain. Most object classes define a set of required and
optional attributes. This attribute list represents the kind of data that you both must and may store on the entry.
Certificate Authority
Certifies identity Trusts
Asserts identity
End-entity Identity Verifier
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Source of Authority
If we find the use of PKI as authentication we are comes to know that certificate authority checks the user.
Different CA's have different identity validation procedures. Some may grant the user a digital certificate with only
a name and email address, while others may involve personal interviews, background checks etc. (Remembering
that authentication is a process of validating an identity based on risk means that certificate authorities' digital
certificate has a wide range of trust…caveat emptor). The user is granted a digital certificate. Often there are two
components to this; private and public keys.
The user wishes to send an email to a business associate. The user digitally signs the email with their private
key. The email is sent to the business associate. The business associate uses the sending user's public key to
decrypt the message. The use of digital certificates in this example provides confidentiality, message integrity and
user authentication without having to exchange secrets in advance. PKI was oversold on its capabilities when it
was originally introduced several years ago. There were serious problems with browser incompatibilities, costs
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associated with issuing and managing digital certificates and a business environment that had not yet widely
adopted the internet to rethink business processes between enterprises.
9.2 Kerberos: Kerberos is a solution to your network security problems. It provides the tools of authentication and
strong cryptography over the network to help you secure your information systems across your entire enterprise.
We hope you find Kerberos as useful as it has been to us.
9.4 PMI: PMI is depends on the attribute certificates issued by an Attribute Authorities, PMI doesn’t provide the
mechanism to trust certificate holder’s identity while PKI is used to authenticate identities of issuers and holders in
attribute certificates.
9.5 X.509 Standard: X.509 standard defines the directory schema of PKI and PMI where directory schema is
describes the types of objects in the directory and its optional attributes.
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protocol that provides privacy and authentication for your network traffic. These browsers can only use this
protocol with web servers that support SSL.
• Various code-signing schemes, such as signed Java Archives, and Microsoft Authenticode.
• Various secure E-Mail standards, such as PEM and S/MIME.
• E-Commerce protocols, such as SET.
• Windows: All Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) and Windows authentication integration options,
including Basic, Digest, Certificates, Windows NT LAN Manager (NTLM), and Kerberos. Windows
authentication allows IIS to perform the authentication for SharePoint Foundation
Finally, we found that the authentication model consists of three major entities like Certificates Attributes, End-
entity, and the identity verifier and authorization model consists of three major entities like SOA, the privilege
holder and the privilege verifier. A PMI is to authorization what a PKI is to authentication
CONCLUSION
In this paper, two representative protocols of authentication and authorization are analyzed and compared with.
Then a new high-compatible trust model is proposed. This model helps to realize the aim of interlinking
heterogeneous domains supported by different authentication technique and security policy. However a security
policy or trust model, no matter how ideal it is theoretically, could not speak well for its feasibility. To imperfect this
model, future studies will be focused into strengthening the ticket validity and enhancing mutual authentication
efficiency according to the characteristics of the distributed network environment. The protocols are described in
this paper are basically used on the basis of Certificate Authority to checks the users for security purpose and to
introduce that on which major entities the authentication and authorization models are depends. I conclude that
data from users are encrypt and decrypt by using the key through these protocols helps for the security of the
distributed systems.
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