A Smartcard Fault - tolerant Authentication Server

In this paper we present a fault-tolerant and intrusion-tolerant authentication server. This server is composed of several sites, each one managed by a different security administrator. We describe the registration and authentication protocols based on smartcards. Those protocols have been implemented by using Bull CP8 MP smartcards. We show how to make them secure in spite of possible failures on a minority of authentication sites. Then we describe a possible implementation based on public-key smartcards achieving the same properties of fault tolerance and intrusion tolerance.