A Secure Authentication Protocol for Enterprise Administrative Devices

Authentication is the backbone of Enterprise Se-curity standards, as over the years, threats have grown more complex, there has been a far and wide call for improvement to authentication standards, although the past few years have brought along innovations like SSO and OAuth. However at an enterprise level these solutions have been proprietary and vendor based, there has always been a lack of a system that consolidates multiple factors taken based upon physical and as well as re-collective methods and combines them to form a single system of authentication that can work as solution for systems that are bound in location and time of access, while only being used by single administrator, e.g Domain controllers on Active Directory machines, such a system is necessary when the security of administrative systems is considered, protecting these systems from malicious use which might mean social engineering or reverse shell attacks, which are paramount threats to administrative systems. Thus the proposed system is targeted at improving the authentication process by implementing multi-factor authentication (MFA), providing keys which are indepen-dently strong as well as resilient enough so as to withstand multiple attacks. The authentication keys are implemented in such a way that even if the system is accessed remotely and the attacker has the password to it, he/she would still not be able to get access to it. Moreover, the use of a time assurance key ensures the protection of the system in off-hours too. This method is of course backed by a manual override in case of a failure in one of the keys. The process of manual override is intentionally kept tedious and involves keys that are granted to the higher authorities at the time of initial setup. Implementation of MFA ensures that even if one of the keys is compromised, the entire system is unaffected. The proposed system does not put a burden on the user as the user might only worry about the password and the steganographic key he/she holds as the rest of the key checks are done by the system itself. In this way the system presented in this paper would help secure administrative systems and guard it from any potential attack verticals.