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Authentication in Distributed Systems:
Theory and Practice
November 1, 1992

Download PDF
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
BibTex
Authors

Butler Lampson

Martin Abadi

Michael Burrows

Edward Wobber
Published In

ACM Transactions on Computer Systems
Publication Type
Inproceedings
Journal
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems
Pages
265-310
Volume
10
Number
4
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.
Copyright © 1992 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Permission to make
digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without
fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that
copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this
work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy
otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific
permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Publications Dept, ACM Inc., fax +1 (212)
869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. The definitive version of this paper can be found at
ACM’s Digital Library –http://www.acm.org/dl/.

Abstract

Related Info
Abstract
We describe a theory of authentication and a system that implements it. Our theory is based on
the notion of principal and a ‘speaks for’ relation between principals. A simple principal
either has a name or is a communication channel; a compound principal can express an adopted
role or delegated authority. The theory shows how to reason about a principal’s authority by
deducing the other principals that it can speak for; authenticating a channel is one important
application. We use the theory to explain many existing and proposed security mechanisms. In
particular, we describe the system we have built. It passes principals efficiently as arguments or
results of remote procedure calls, and it handles public and shared key encryption, name lookup
in a large name space, groups of principals, program loading, delegation, access control, and
revocation.
Related Info
Related Files
 word.doc
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 Programming languages and software engineering
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 Microsoft Research Lab - Redmond
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