A Survey on Distributed System Security using Three Factor Authentication

Abstract

As part of the security within distributed systems, various services and resources are distributed all over the network and they need protection from unauthorized users. Many of the information resources that are made available in distributed systems have a high intrinsic value to their users. Their security is therefore of considerable importance. To determine the identity of a remote client, remote authentication is most commonly used. This paper mainly investigates the systematic approaches for authenticating clients by three factors, namely password, smartcard and biometric. Most early authentication mechanism is solely based on password. While such protocols are relatively easy to implement, password has more vulnerabilities. Due to these concerns, hardware authentication tokens are used to strengthen the security in user authentication. Thus smartcard based password authentication mechanism has introduced. It could also fail if an attacker has successfully obtained the password and the data in the smart card. In this case, a third authentication factor, biometric characteristics can alleviate the problem and further improve the system's assurance. This survey on distributed Systems Security provides a holistic insight into current security issues, processes, and solutions, and maps out future directions in the context of today's distributed systems.