An efficient delegation protocol with delegation traceability in the X.509 proxy certificate environment for computational grids

Abstract

The X.509 proxy certificate is widely used to delegate an entity's right to another entity in the computational grid environment. However, this proxy certificate has two drawbacks: the potential security threat caused by non-traceability of a delegation chain and the inefficiency caused by an interactive communication between the right grantor and the right grantee on the delegation protocol. To address these problems, a new delegation protocol is presented. The proposed protocol employs an ID-based key generation technique to support delegation traceability and non-interactive delegation. Since access-right delegation occurs frequently in the computational grid environment, the proposed protocol can enhance security by providing delegation traceability and can enhance efficiency by reducing the inter-domain communication cost. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.