Paper 2018/413

Scaling Backend Authentication at Facebook

Kevin Lewi, Callen Rain, Stephen Weis, Yueting Lee, Haozhi Xiong, and Benjamin Yang

Abstract

Secure authentication and authorization within Facebook’s infrastructure play important roles in protecting people using Facebook’s services. Enforcing security while maintaining a flexible and performant infrastructure can be challenging at Facebook’s scale, especially in the presence of varying layers of trust among our servers. Providing authentication and encryption on a per-connection basis is certainly necessary, but also insufficient for securing more complex flows involving multiple services or intermediaries at lower levels of trust. To handle these more complicated scenarios, we have developed two token-based mechanisms for authentication. The first type is based on certificates and allows for flexible verification due to its public-key nature. The second type, known as “crypto auth tokens”, is symmetric-key based, and hence more restrictive, but also much more scalable to a high volume of requests. Crypto auth tokens rely on pseudorandom functions to generate independently-distributed keys for distinct identities. Finally, we provide (mock) examples which illustrate how both of our token primitives can be used to authenticate real-world flows within our infrastructure, and how a token-based approach to authentication can be used to handle security more broadly in other infrastructures which have strict performance requirements and where relying on TLS alone is not enough.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Cryptographic protocols
Publication info
Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords
authenticationsecret-key cryptography
Contact author(s)
klewi @ cs stanford edu
History
2018-05-10: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2018/413
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2018/413,
      author = {Kevin Lewi and Callen Rain and Stephen Weis and Yueting Lee and Haozhi Xiong and Benjamin Yang},
      title = {Scaling Backend Authentication at Facebook},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2018/413},
      year = {2018},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/413}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/413}
}
Note: In order to protect the privacy of readers, eprint.iacr.org does not use cookies or embedded third party content.