Alignment of Authentication Information for Trust Federation

Accelerated by the rapid deployment of distributed systems and the Internet, online collaboration and information sharing are pervasive in enterprise computing environment. With regard to the requirements of online collaboration and information sharing, authentication information needs flexible manipulation to facilitate federation across trust domains. To achieve identity federation for federated trust across organizational boundaries or trust domains, authentication information must sometimes be adjusted, transformed, augmented, or substituted in accordance with trust level changes during the authorization or verification operations. In this paper, we propose a plug-in style alignment using a wavelet transformation to manipulate authentication templates for verification (and other purposes) in the process of federation. We also illustrate how this mechanism can be used in metadata exchange with security tokens for web services. In our implementation, we incorporate BioAPI to support the capability to adapt to different authentication workflow models and different authentication technologies. Our experimental results show that the overhead of this plug-in alignment in practical applications is negligible.