Cross-Domain Authentication and Interoperability Scheme for Federated Cloud

Abstract

Collaboration of the clouds has revolutionized the IT industry whereby different service providers can come together with an agreement to leverage the services from each other and make efficient use of various available resources. For such type of collaborations, there is different working environments with different authentication protocols. In heterogeneous domain, two major network authentication protocols such as X.509 and Kerberos 5 have been widely used. X.509 is asymmetric-based, whereas the Kerberos 4 is symmetric-based. Therefore, communication between these protocols was a challenging task. But with the emergence of Kerberos 5, the problem of communication between two domains have been resolved to a large extent as Kerberos 5 does support asymmetric encryption. Also, one of the ever existing issued in any domain is of the security. Each user needs to prove its identity before accessing any resources. This authentication phase in multiple domain environment becomes a biggest challenge. Another issue is of interoperability, which is strongly required to meet the user needs in the collaborative structure of clouds. The proposed model enables cross-domain mutual authentication between X.509 domain and Kerberos 5 domain using Elliptic Curve Cryptography(ECC) as well as Public Key Cryptography for Initial Authentication (PKINIT).