The Design and development of secure password synchronization and querting system for the enterprise networks /

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1124915 (Table of Contents)

Organizations that run large computer networks should also provide maintenance for the computers on these networks. Nowadays, it is a common practice to outsource this maintenance task to specialized service firms. These service firms may not be considered trustworthy. Therefore, the local administrator password of a local machine that a maintenance technician needs to access should be changed periodically. Consequently, the technician needs a way to learn the current local administrator password of each computer. In this thesis, a secure password synchronization and querying system is presented. In this system, the local administrator passwords of computers are changed periodically in synchronization with a server managing the system. The maintenance technicians can learn the current password of a computer by querying the server. For synchronization and querying mechanisms, we propose three secure protocols that employ symmetric and asymmetric encryption techniques. Moreover, in this thesis, the proposed protocols are implemented as a software product and the performance of the system is evaluated by simulating the system. The average of the number of successful synchronizations stays constant when the number of computers is increased from 3,000 to 20,000 in the simulation. An increase in the number of computers doesn't change the behavior of the system. In addition, it is shown that the system can be configured to survive under rough network conditions. The implementation details and the performance evaluation of the system are presented in the thesis.