IDnet Mesh: for a More Secure Intranet and Internet (28118)
INVENTION: IDnet Mesh increases security and authentication on Intranets and the Internet. It accounts for a user’s real identity without publicly revealing his identity. IDnet Mesh helps ensure that all participating users on a web site are who they claim to be to a trusted authority, including their age and gender. In addition, IDnet Mesh’s technology can be used for VPN to significantly upgrade the performance of the current security-token-based authentication systems. IDnet Mesh:Provides accountability for a user’s real identity Is inexpensive and easy to implement Is highly scalable and secure Requires no changes to current Internet infrastructure and protocols Adopts a practical trust model Provides a more convenient and safer security token solution for VPN Provides a more scalable and efficient authentication system for VPN Here is how IDnet Mesh basically works. A user physically goes to a recognized authority, where she provides proof of identification and is validated as a registered IDnet user. The authority’s database stores the user’s real identity. With the user still physically present, the authority provides her with an encoded “Internet passport,” which she can later use to access services that require identity validation. The Internet passport is a tamper-resistant biometric hardware device. The heart of IDnet is that it provides software agents using algorithms and protocols that work with the Internet Passport to provide a greatly improved trust model that is secure, highly scalable, and incrementally deployable. IDnet Mesh is described in detail in http://networks.cs.northwestern.edu/publications/idnets.pdf
Applications: IDnet Mesh can be used in a wide variety of applications that include VPN, social networking sites, mitigation of Email SPAM, improvement of Web 2.0 application integrity, guarding against copyright infringement for online file sharing, and so forth.
Results:The investigators implemented IDnet Mesh algorithms and protocols on a cluster of servers in Emulab to perform benchmarks for the core algorithm and to test functional integrity of the protocol implementation. They developed analytical models to study scalability, security, efficiency and reliability, and evaluated overhead in the case of Email and Web services to demonstrate that IDnet Mesh can be scalably integrated with these services to improve their functional integrity.
The paper cited above demonstrates that a single IDnet server can effectively serve 75,000 users for identity validations associated with their Web and Email services. The number of served clients per IDnet server could be further significantly increased when we consider the fact that in many cases we only need to use the IDnet service to bootstrap user accountability. Servers could be incrementally added as the number of users increase.
Inventor(s): Leiwen Deng and Aleksandar Kuzmanovic
Type of Offer: Licensing
« More Computer Science Patents
« More Internet Patents