Conference authentication and key distribution service in the RHODOS distributed system

This paper reports on the development of a conference authentication and key distribution service for distributed systems. We demonstrate that it is possible to develop such a service as an integral part of the RHODOS distributed operating system, subject to some requirements and extensions to the original Koyama - Ohta system. The basic RHODOS requirement is that users cannot be trusted, and therefore they cannot hold any cryptographic parameters, but their own passwords. This requirement overcomes conspiracy attack by conference participants, excluding the conference initiator. The authentication service supported by RHODOS provides the following two fundamental operations: the distribution of the initial cryptographic parameters which is performed at the stage of a specially designed user login authentication and setting up an authenticated conference. Moreover, the service supports one-way and two-way authentication.