A methodology for analyzing the performance of authentication protocols

  • Authors:
  • Alan Harbitter;Daniel A. Menascé

  • Affiliations:
  • PEC Solutions, Inc., Fairfax, VA;George Mason University, Fairfax, VA

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC)
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

Performance, in terms of user response time and the consumption of processing and communications resources, is an important factor to be considered when designing authentication protocols. The mix of public key and secret key encryption algorithms typically included in these protocols makes it difficult to model performance using conventional analytical methods. In this article, we develop a validated modeling methodology to be used for analyzing authentication protocol features, and we use two examples to illustrate the methodology. In the first example, we analyze the environmental parameters that favor one proposed public-key-enabled Kerberos variant over another in the context of a large, multiple-realm network. In the second example, we propose a Kerberos variant for a mobile computing environment and analyze the performance benefits realized by introducing a proxy to offload processing and communications workload.