Distributed authentication system to access data in multiple secure domains

Currently, distributed systems are used to store information in remote sites. However, these systems are exposed to different types of security risks such as virus, Trojans or ramsomware, and security mechanisms are required to protect the access to these data and guarantee their privacy and integrity. Authentication plays an important role for security issues in a computer system. Authentication is used to prove the user identity, and it is strongly related with the access control to limits the actions and operations that an authenticated user can do in a computer system. However, authentication is a previously step to the access control, and it assumes that authentication of a user has been done successfully. Several cryptography methods can be integrated in an authentication mechanism in order to obtain robust authentication schemes. An authentication scheme based on Kerberos to access data in multiples domains is presented in this paper. A challenge in our authentication scheme is related with the authentication of Kerberos servers. To deal with this problem a keys distribution architecture is added to authentication scheme in order to authenticate the Kerberos servers in a secure way.