International Business Machines Corporation

Robert John Paganetti

David S Kern

Jane B Marcus

Nancy Ellen Kho

Alan D Eldridge

Patrick Charles Mancuso

Shiu Fun Poon

Michael J Kerrigan

David Scott Kern, Jr

Richard Francis Annicchiarico

A secure database includes a catalog of information about one or more identity providers (IdPs) that are trusted by a service provider (SP) to authenticate users on the SP's behalf. The catalog securely stores one or more IdP configurations. An entry in the database stores information associated with the trusted IdP including artifacts to identify the IdP, artifacts used by the IdP for cryptographic operations, and a specification of one or more website(s) serviced by the trusted identity provider. Upon receipt by the SP of identity information representing a user that has authenticated to an IdP, information in the catalog of information is used to determine whether the IdP is trusted to authenticate the user on the service provider's behalf. The determination verifies that the SP uses the IdP and that a binding between an IdP identifier and at least one IdP cryptographic artifact is valid.

Secure configuration catalog of trusted identity providers

A system for automating the recovery of a credential store, in which client software generates a temporary key pair based on a new password, and sends client information including the user's name, the public half of the temporary key pair, and the host name of the client computer system to a server system, from which the client information is passed to a recovery process. The client software process displays a prompt indicating that the user should call a help desk. A help desk administrator verifies the user's identity and approves the user's request by causing an approval message to be sent to the recovery process. The recovery process obtains recovery information consisting of either the decryption key(s) for the credential store, or a decrypted copy of the credential store, and encrypts the recovery information using the temporary public key. The client process downloads the recovery information from the server, and decrypts it using private key of the temporary key pair. The credential store can then be decrypted using the recovery information if necessary, then re-encrypted based on the new password. The encrypted recovery information is stored on the server and re-used for a certain period of time, after which it is deleted, thus allowing multiple copies of the credential store to be conveniently recovered.

Method and system for automating the recovery of a credential store when a user has forgotten their password using a temporary key pair created based on a new password provided by the user

A method is provided for a enabling a user to initiate a password protected backup copy of the user's credentials. The method includes providing a user with a credential store containing information relating to the user's identity, generating a different recovery password of any length for each recovery authority, encrypting the recovery password for each recovery authority, storing the encrypted recovery passwords in the credential store, and sending a copy of the information by the user from the credential store to a central repository.

Method for enabling an administrator to configure a recovery password

One or more data structures are received by a computing device, wherein the one or more data structures include at least one or more user credentials. The one or more user credentials are normalized by the computing device to generate a first graph. One or more nodes of the first graph and one or more nodes of at least a second graph are analyzed by the computing device, wherein analyzing includes at least identifying a logical correlation between the one or more nodes of the first graph and the one or more nodes of at least the second graph. A third graph is generated by the computing device based, at least in part, upon the analysis of the one or more nodes of the first graph and the one or more nodes of at least the second graph. An output data structure is generated by the computing device based, at least in part, upon the third graph.

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Scituate, MA, United States of America

Robert John Paganetti