Papers

https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sws/abstracts/nasm04.shtml     Last modified: 01/16/04 12:36:27 PM

Sidharth Nazareth, Sean W. Smith
Using SPKI/SDSI for Distributed Maintenance of Attribute Release Policies in Shibboleth Technical Report TR2004-485, Department of Computer Science, Dartmouth College.
January 2004

Abstract

The Shibboleth middleware from Internet2 provides a way for users at higher-education institutions to access remote electronic content in compliance with the inter-institutional license agreements that govern such access. To protect end-user privacy, Shibboleth permits users to construct attribute release policies that control what user credentials a given content provider can obtain. However, Shibboleth leaves unspecified how to construct these policies.

To be effective, a solution needs to accommodate the typical nature of a university: a set of decentralized fiefdoms. This need argues for a public-key infrastructure (PKI) approach---since public-key cryptography does not require parties to agree on a secret beforehand, and parties distributed throughout the institution are unlikely to agree on anything. However, this need also argues against the strict hierarchical structure of traditional PKI---policy in different fiefdoms will be decided differently, and originate within the fiefdom, rather than from an overall root.

This paper presents our design and prototype of a system that uses the decentralized public-key framework of SPKI/SDSI to solve this problem.

See Also

Nazareth thesis

Download

PDF

Back to home page Maintained by Sean Smith, sws@cs.dartmouth.edu