A Chained Authentication Model for Virtual Organizations

Digital certificates (through the use of publickey cryptography) provide an entity the power to authenticate users even when the CA (Certification Authority) that issued the certificate is not on line. This authentication mechanism is widely used today in Virtual Organizations (VOs) to distribute the weight of the authentication. However, as shown in this paper, the use of public-key cryptography may dramatically reduce the performance of a system, and consequently reduce the performance of the VO if it is used to authenticate users at every node. Thus, we outline the specifications of a Virtual Organization, where public-key cryptography is used only for the initial authentication of nodes. To provide access to multiple resources in the VO, a Chained Authentication Model is proposed that makes use of a symmetric-key based three-party authentication protocol.