A consistent history authentication protocol

Abstract

Traditional strong authentication systems rely on a certification chain to delegate the authority of trusting an intermediate end.However, in some practical life scenarios a relayed authentication is not accepted and thus it would be advisable a straight proof of trustiness with a direct interaction with the involved party. Our protocol introduces a registry of certified operations from which it descends the authentication and the consequent proof of identity. Despite the fact that such system requires for registrar initialization, the Consistent History Protocol provides a reasonable degree of reliability in identifying subjects at the steady state. As application, we deployed the protocol in the indirect electronic data collection scenario, where large data flows have to be exchanged and certified among a set of mutually trusted Institutions. The experimental results report the processing overhead introduced by the authentication protocol, which results negligible with respect a classical strong authentication method built around the OpenSSL library.