The development and testing of the identity-based conference key distribution system for the Rhodos distributed system

In this paper, we demonstrate that it is possible to develop an authentication service as an integral part of a 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. The Authentication Service supported by the RHODOS distributed operating system provides the following operations: the distribution of the initial cryptographic parameters, user login authentication, one-way and two-way authentication, and conference authentication. The operational properties have been demonstrated by setting up a conference and authenticating conference participants in different circumstance.