A Secure Certificate for Secure Group Communication

Security is a primary concern in group communication, and secure authentication is essential to establishing a secure group communication. Most conventional authentications consist of knowledge-based and token-based methods. One of the token-based methods is a X.509 certificate, which is used under a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI); it is the most well-known authentication system in a distributed network environment. However, it has a well-known weakness, which only proves the belonging of a certificate. PKI cannot assure identity of a person. The conventional knowledge-based and token-based methods do not really provide positive personal identification because they rely on surrogate representations of the person’s identity. Therefore, I propose a secure X.509 certificate with biometric information to assure the identity of the person who uses the X.509 certificate in a distributed computing environment.