CERTIFICATE BASED AUTHENTICATION FOR ONLINE SERVICES

摘要

In one embodiment, a client computer system receives user credentials from a computer user. The client computer system formulates a system identifier that uniquely identifies the system, and sends the received user credentials with the system identifier to an authentication service running on a datacenter server. The authentication service is configured to authenticate the user credentials and generate an authentication certificate based on the user credentials and the system identifier. The client computer system receives the generated authentication certificate from the authentication service and stores the received authentication certificate. The computer system receives an authentication request to authenticate the user subsequent to storing the certificate and, in response to the authentication request, automatically sends the stored authentication certificate to indicate to the datacenter server that the user is authorized to access the datacenter-provided information, without prompting the user to provide user credentials for authentication.