Policy based roles for distributed systems security

Distributed systems are increasingly being used in commercial environments necessitating the development of trustworthy and reliable security mechanisms. There is often no clear informal or formal specification of enterprise authorisation policies and no tools to translate policy specifications to access control implementation mechanisms such as capabilities or Access Control Lists. It is thus difficult to analyse the policy to detect conflicts or flaws and it is difficult to verify that the implementation corresponds to the policy specification. We present in this paper a framework for the specification of management policies. We are concerned with two types of policies: obligations which specify what activities a manager or agent must or must not perform on a set of target objects and authorisations which specify what activities a subject (manager or agent) can or can not perform on the set of target objects. Management policies are then grouped into roles reflecting the organisation..

Role-based security for distributed object systems

This paper describes a security architecture designed to support role-based access control for distributed object systems in a large-scale, multi-organisational enterprise in which domains are used to group objects for specifying security policies. We use the concept of a role to define access control related to a position within an organisation although our role framework caters for the specification of both authorisation and obligation policies. Access control and authentication is implemented using security agents on a per host basis to achieve a high degree of transparency to the application level. Cascaded delegation of access rights is also supported. The domain based authentication service uses symmetric cryptography and is implemented by replicated servers which maintain minimal state

A Security Framework Supporting Domain Based Access Control in Distributed Systems

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A Security Framework Supporting Domain-Based Access Conttol

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An Authentication Service Supporting Domain Based Access Control Policies

This paper describes the basic architecture of an authentication service for distributed systems in which domains are used to group objects in order to specify policy. This is necessary for very large scale systems where it is impractical to specify policies for individual objects. The enforcement of a policy that is specified in terms of domains requires authentication of object membership of domains. As the use of asymmetric cryptography would result in unacceptable performance, the proposed system is based on the use of symmetric cryptography for intra-realm authentication of identities or domain membership, while asymmetric cryptography can still be used for interrealm authentication. It utilises replicated trusted authentication servers with minimal state in order to avoid problems in terms of the security and state consistency of the replicas. This is achieved by using private-key certificates which provide a similar functionality to the public key certificates in asymmetric cryp..