[Thesis topic] Distributed certificate management solution for authentication in decentralized environments

[ceflg]

Designing a distributed certificate management solution for authentication in decentralized environments

Objective

The goal of this thesis/theses is to design and potentially implement a certificate management solution that enables user authentication in distributed environments. The study will analyze various technical alternatives and assess their suitability in terms of fault tolerance and scalability.

A potential research question could be:

How do different technologies support distributed certificate management, and which combination provides the best fault tolerance, scalability, and security in a decentralized server infrastructure?

Scope and possible research divisions

Depending on the focus and scope of the thesis, different aspects of this topic could be explored separately, potentially forming the basis for multiple research projects. Some possible research directions include:

• Design and implementation of a distributed certificate management system
• Comparison of different PKI solutions for decentralized environments
• Security evaluation of certificate-based authentication in a microservices architecture
• Performance benchmarking of certificate validation and revocation methods in large-scale distributed systems

Potential technologies for distributed certificate management

• PKI Solutions: HashiCorp Vault, Let’s Encrypt, OpenSSL
• Distributed Databases: etcd, Consul, PostgreSQL, MySQL
• Synchronization Solutions: Redis, Kafka, rsync
• Certificate Validation Methods: OCSP, CRL
• + Other emerging technologies

Expected outcomes

✅ Documentation on different implementation approaches, including their benefits and challenges
✅ Test results on the performance, reliability, and maintainability of various solutions
✅ Implementation of a prototype distributed certificate management system in an environment with at least three servers, using Terraform for infrastructure management
✅ Security testing of the implemented system, including vulnerability analysis, certificate revocation handling, and resistance to attacks such as Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) and unauthorized certificate issuance and other.

This topic offers multiple angles for research, allowing for different thesis projects based on the selected focus area.