Hughes Aircraft Company

James E Zmuda

Erwin W Bathrick

Kenneth C Kung

Todd E Matthews

Cheng-Chi Huang

Mae-Hwa Ma

John W Garber

Regina L Matthews

A computer system and a method for the protected distribution of certificate and keying material between a certification authority and at least one entity in the certification authority's domain, including the steps of sending keying material, including a password, generated by the Certifying Authority to the entity via a secure medium; generating and protecting, by the entity, a public and a private key pair using the keying material provided it by the certifying authority; generating, protecting and sending a request for a certificate to the certifying authority using the keying material provided it by the certifying authority; requesting, by the certifying authority, that the public key and address of the entity be sent to the certifying authority; protecting and sending the public key and address of the entity to the certifying authority using the keying material provided it by the certifying authority; assembling and issuing the certificate to the entity from the certifying authority and recording the public key of the entity at the certifying authority for public use within the domain of the certifying authority.

Method of protected distribution of keying and certificate material

An authentication method that permits a user and a file serving workstation to mutually authenticate themselves. This is accomplished by exchanging a random number that is encrypted by a password that is known to the user and stored in a password file on the file serving workstation. A logon ID is sent from the client workstation to the server workstation. The stored user password corresponding to the user ID is retrieved from the password file. A random number is created that is encrypted by a symmetric encryption algorithm on the server workstation using the retrieved user password, and which provides an encrypted password. The user is then requested to enter the password into the user workstation. The entered password is used to decrypt the encrypted password received from the server workstation and retrieve the random number therefrom to authenticate the server workstation. The random number is then used as the encryption and decryption key for communication between the user and server workstations. An encrypted message is transmitted using the random number from the client workstation to the server workstation. The encrypted message is decrypted at the server workstation to authenticate the user.

Method for providing mutual authentication of a user and a server on a

The invention is an improved distributed information system which automatically provides for the transmission of security protocol data units between end-users of a distributed information system. The invention compares the address and security key of a received security protocol data unit to stored end-system addresses and security key information and, in the absence of an existing end-system address and security key, automatically initiates negotiation of a security key between end-systems and then confirms the negotiated security key and initiates a security protocol transmission of the data unit. A method af automatic invoking secure communications between end-systems of a distributed information system is also disclosed.

Distributed information system having automatic invocation of key

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Lake Forest, CA, United States of America

James E Zmuda