Practical Authentication in Distributed Environments

Authentication is one of the biggest issues concerning information security in the context of distributed environments. Actually, this crucial step enables both to authorize (or not) a user to access a resource and to define different classes of users on the system. Many papers, like [16], [17], expound various solutions to provide authentication in distributed environments. Our contribution in this article consists in drawing a general overview of current authentication solutions in such context, while providing a classification of computing grids based on administrative heterogeneity. With this intention, this paper details successively authentication aspects regarding the main operating systems, some widespread protocols and the integration of physical media.

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