A Novel Trigon based Dual Authentication Protocol for Enhancing Security in Grid Environment

In recent times, a necessity has been raised in order to distribute computing applications often across grids. These applications are dependent on the services like data transfer or data portal services as well as submission of jobs. Security is of utmost importance in grid computing applications as grid resources are heterogeneous, dynamic, and multi-domain. Authentication remains as the significant security challenge in grid environment. In traditional authentication protocol a single server stores the sensitive user credentials, like username and password. When such a server is compromised, a large number of user passwords, will be exposed. Our proposed approach uses a dual authentication protocol in order to improve the authentication service in grid environment. The protocol utilizes the fundamental concepts of trigon and based on the parameters of the trigon the user authentication will be performed. In the proposed protocol, the password is interpreted and alienated into more than one unit and these units are stored in two different servers, namely, Authentication Server and Backend Server. Only when the combined authentication scheme from both the servers authenticates the user, the privilege of accessing the requested resources is obtained by the user. The main advantage of utilizing the dual authentication protocol in grid computing is that an adversary user cannot attain the access privilege by compromising a single consolidated server because of the fact that the split password is stored in different servers. Keywords-Dual authentication; authentication protocol; trigon parameters; authentication code; grid computing; grid security.