Methods, devices, and computer program products for discovering authentication servers and establishing trust relationships therewith

Abstract

Using an authentication server to discover one or more additional authentication servers and to dynamically establish a trust relationship with the one or more additional authentication servers. The authentication server searches for the one or more additional authentication servers to discover one or more sources of authentication tokens, and inspects an incoming authentication request from the one or more additional authentication servers to determine if the request is carrying one or more authentication tokens from a newly discovered realm. Once the authentication server determines a newly discovered realm to be trustworthy, the authentication server receives a directory schema from the newly discovered realm and compares the received directory schema with a known directory schema retrieved by the authentication server to identify an intersection of the received directory schema and the known directory schema. The authentication server uses the intersection to identify a primary key, and to identify any unique information that is specific to either the authentication server or the newly discovered realm.