Patent ID: 7437447

Claim:
A method for authenticating a requesting entity in a subnet communications environment, the method comprising: determining a client identification of a client node associated with the requesting entity by receiving a source identifier from said requesting entity and associating said source identifier with one or more permanent identifiers of said client node, wherein said source identifier is a source logical identifier (SLID), and said one or more permanent identifiers are one or more globally unique identifiers (GUID) of said client node; determining whether the requesting entity associated with said client node is acting in a supervisor capacity by defining a supervisor only privileged key for each client node in the communications environment, and by determining whether a connection request received from said requested entity includes said supervisor only privileged key corresponding to said client node of said requesting entity; and returning, from a resource provider node, a key to said requesting entity upon determining that said client identification of said client node indicates that said client node is permitted to access one or more resources of said provider node, and that said client node is acting in a supervisor capacity; wherein said associating said SLID with one or more globally unique identifiers (GUID) of said client node further comprises: forwarding said SLID to a subnet administrator; and receiving, from said subnet administrator, said one or more GUIDs corresponding to said SLID.