Uniform authentication principals for multiprotocol NAS devices

NAS appliances are increasingly becoming more distributed in nature, leading to numerous geographical or operational domains segregating the available Enterprise data. In such an environment, there are cases of subdivision of an authentication domain into multiple domains, substitution or intermixing of authentication protocols based on geographical boundaries. Since the user principals used in authentication have different schematics for different protocols, having a uniform identifier is a challenging task. There is a need for a common representation for user identification from the NAS client perspective. This paper deals with developing a framework that enables usage of a persistent, fixed format user authentication principal in a heterogeneous NAS protocol environment. The framework aims at transparent resolution of the user principals without mandating any modifications in the existing access protocol daemons on the client or server side. In addition, the paper discusses a single sign on stage for a NAS environment for use with standard NAS protocols such as NFS, CIFS, HTTP and so on.