The unavailability of Internet domain authentication results in a phenomenon of independent implementation by individual system. The consequence is that one single personal has to maintain a bunch of account/password information. How to manage these accounts, effectively and securely, will be a very key issue for system service usability and deployment.

In this paper, we introduce a unified key management and authentication automation middleware: uKey. UKey middleware is envisioned to improve system usability by providing key management and authentication automation process for heterogeneous system services, such as http/https web accounts authentication, telnet/rsh/ftp computer user accounts authentication, among others. Secure, unified, centralized account management, automated authentication support, zero-touch system instrumentation are characteristics of our middleware. In this paper, the uKey middleware architecture, its prototype implementation and performance evaluation will be presented.