ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
Prudent Engineering Practice for Cryptographic Protocols
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Using encryption for authentication in large networks of computers
Communications of the ACM
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The term authentication is used to refer to several distinct, though related, processes. The earliest use, as described in Needham and Schroeder's paper (1978), is to arrange that two entities engaged in communication, generically referred to as principals, should each be confident as to the other's identity. A more demanding requirement is for each to be able to convince a referee or arbiter that a certain transaction was performed by the other--generally known as non-repudiation. Finally, document content may need to be authenticated in the sense that its integrity is guaranteed in addition to original authorship. In theory, authentication is quite distinct from the provision of confidentiality, but in practice they often go together.