Abstract: A system and method for distributed authentication service is disclosed, which prevents any single participant from monitoring the logon rates of other participants is disclosed. In particular, there is no single central list that is consulted to identify where the authentication should be performed. Rather, the systems keys on the domain portion of the global user ID. The client portion parses the entered ID and re-directs the submission to the appropriate authentication service. Rather than consulting a global look-up table, the domain name is pre-pended to a central host domain and DNS is consulted to find the location of the underlying authentication servers. The DNS look-up is distributed and cached and, as a result, the look-up cannot be centrally monitored.

Abstract: A system and method for distributed authentication service is disclosed, which prevents any single participant from monitoring the logon rates of other participants is disclosed. In particular, there is no single central list that is consulted to identify where the authentication should be performed. Rather, the systems keys on the domain portion of the global user ID. The client portion parses the entered ID and re-directs the submission to the appropriate authentication service. Rather than consulting a global look-up table, the domain name is pre-pended to a central host domain and DNS is consulted to find the location of the underlying authentication servers. The DNS look-up is distributed and cached and, as a result, the look-up cannot be centrally monitored.