Review Of Single Sign On Systems Mansee A. Mongia 05 th March,2008

Topic Of The Project: Review Of Single Sign On Systems Objective of this project : Study the need for authentication and secure access in distributed environment. Is to understand the need of Single Sign on Systems. Is to do literature review and summarize the different approaches to Single Sign-On systems.

Single Sign On Method of Access Control. Single sign on is a session/user authentication process that allows a user to provide authentication once in order to access multiple applications. Centralised authentication Example- Microsoft Passport Network service developed and provided by Microsoft allows users to log in to many websites (hotmail, msn messenger, MSNBC…)using one account itself.

Motivation Systems are growing at a fast pace and resources are being spread out in the distributed system. Remove the headache for administration and users due to multiple authentication- Login once, access everything. Maintaining secure access Simplified Management critical for the usability of distributed systems - Ease of use. Allow remote or distributed users to work productively

Single Sign On Capability In Distributed Operating System Identifying one selves all the time can be a burden to users. Enabling single sign-on (SSO) allows the user have secure access without requiring an additional authentication prompt. Improvement of network performance by removing the overhead of authenticating users every time they access the resources / machines in a distributed environment. Improves security through the reduced need for a user to remember lots of authentication information.

Related Work Identified Some of the Single sign on Systems which I have Identified so far are-  Kerberos  Sesame  KryptoKnight  OpenID