Patent ID: 8510564

Claim:
At a computer system including a processor and a memory, in a computer networking environment including a plurality of computing systems, a computer-implemented method for establishing the integrity of a portion of data on at least one level of a plurality of network stack levels, the method comprising: an act of a first federation computer system receiving metadata corresponding to a computer system, the metadata being signed by a digital signature, wherein the digital signature includes the computer system's identity and other federation relationship information configured to establish a trusted federation relationship between the first federation computer system and a second federation computer system; an act of the first federation computer system attempting to validate the received digital signature at a first level of a network stack; an act of the first federation computer system determining that the validation at the first network stack layer was unsuccessful; and based on determining that the validation at the first network stack layer was unsuccessful: an act of the first federation computer system extracting first identity information from the digital signature; and an act of the first federation computer system validating the received digital signature at a second, different level of the network stack, including validating that second identity information used to establish a secure protocol connection at the second level of the network stack matches the first identity information that was extracted from the digital signature.