Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

K Michiko Short

Paul J Leach

Mark Fishel Novak

Yi Zeng

Saurav Sinha

Gopinathan Kannan

Liqiang Zhu

Paul J Miller

Jeremy Dominic Viegas

Alexandru Hanganu

A client can communicate with a middle tier, which can then, in turn, communicate with a back end tier to access information and resources on behalf of the client within the context of a system that can scale well. Each individual back end can establish a policy that defines which computing device can delegate to that back end. That policy can be enforced by a domain controller within the same administrative domain as the particular back end. When a middle tier requests to delegate to a back end, the domain controller to which that request was directed can either apply the policy, or, if the domain controller is in a different domain than the targeted back end, it can direct the middle tier to a domain controller in a different domain and can sign relevant information that the middle tier can utilize when communicating with that different domain controller.

Back-end constrained delegation model

A distributed system in which time-dependent credentials are supplied by controllers that operate according to different local times. Errors that might arise from the controllers generating inconsistent credentials because of time skew are avoided by identifying credentials generated during transition intervals in which different ones of the controllers may generate different credentials at the same absolute time. During a transition interval, controllers and other devices may use credentials differentially based on the nature of the authentication function. Each controller may periodically renew its credentials based on self-scheduled renewals or based on requests from other devices, such that renewal times are offset by random delays to avoid excessive network traffic. Controllers may determine which credential is valid for any given time, based on a cryptographically secure key associated with that time and information identifying the entity that is associated with that credential.

Distributed computer systems with time-dependent credentials

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K Michiko Short