An approach to building a secure and persistent distributed object management system

The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) proposed by the Object Management Group (OMG) is a widely accepted standard to provide a system level framework in design and implementation of distributed objects. The core of the Object Management Architecture (OMA) is an Object Request Broker (ORB), which provides transparency of object location, activation, and communications. However, the specification provided by the OMG is not sufficient. For instance, there are no security specifications when handling object requests through the ORBs. The lack of such a security service prevents the use of CORBA from handling sensitive data such as personal and corporate financial information; In view of the above, this thesis identifies, explores, and provides an approach to handling secure objects in a distributed environment along with a persistent object service using the CORBA specification. The research specifically involves the design and implementation of a secured distributed object service. This object service requires a persistent service and object storage for storing and retrieving security specific information. To provide a secure distributed object environment, a secure object service using the specifications provided by the OMG has been designed and implemented. In addition, to preserve the persistence of secure information, an object service has been implemented to provide a persistent data store; The secure object service can provide a framework for handling distributed object in applications requiring security clearance such as distributed banking, online stock tradings, internet shopping, geographic and medical information systems

Benchmarking real-time distributed object management systems for evolvable and adaptable command and control applications

Abstract This paper describes benchmarking for evolvable and adaptable real-time command and control systems Introduction MITRE's Evolvable Real-Time C3 initiative developed an approach that would enable current real-time systems to evolve into the systems of the future. We designed and implemented an infrastructure and data manager so that various applications could be hosted on the infrastructure. Then we completed a follow-on effort to design flexible adaptable distributed object management systems for command and control (C2) systems. Such an adaptable system would switch scheduling algorithms, policies, and protocols depending on the need and the environment. Both initiatives were carried out for the United States Air Force. One of the key contributions of our work is the investigation of real-time features for distributed object management systems. Partly as a result of our work we are now seeing various real-time distributed object management products being developed. In selecting a real-time distributed object management systems, we need to analyze various criteria. Therefore, we need benchmarking studies for realtime distributed object management systems. Although benchmarking systems such as Hartstone and Distributed Hartstone have been developed for middleware systems, these systems are not developed specifically for distributed object-based middleware. Since much of our work is heavily based on distributed objects, we developed benchmarking systems by adapting the Hartstone system. This paper describes out effort on developing benchmarks. In section 2 we discuss Distributed Hartstone. Then in section 3, we first provide background on the original Hartstone and DHartstone designs from SEI (Software Engineering Institute) and CMU (Carnegie Mellon University). We then describe our design and modification of DHartstone to incorporate the capability to benchmark real-time middleware in Section 4. Sections 5 and 6 describe the design of the benchmarking systems. For more details of our work on benchmarking and experimental results we refer to [MAUR98] and [MAUR99]. For background information of our work we refer t

METU interoperable database system

and Sevgi Foundation, Turkey) is a multidatabase system based on OMG's (OMG is a registered trademark, and CORBA, ORB, OMG IDL, Object Request Broker are trademarks of OMG) distributed object management architecture. It is implemented on top of a CORBA compliant ORB, namely, DEC's ObjectBroker (ObjectBroker is a registered trademark of DEC Corp.) [DDO96]. In MIND all local databases are encapsulated in generic Database Object. The interface of the generic Database Object is de ned in CORBA IDL and multiple implementations of this interface, one for each component DBMSs, namely, Oracle7 (Oracle7 is a trademark of Oracle Corp.), Sybase (Sybase is a trademark of Sybase Corp.), Adabas D (Adabas D is a trademark of Software AG Corp.) and MOOD [Dog94] are provided. MIND provides its users a common data model and a single global query language based on SQL. The main functionalities of MIND are global query processing, global transaction management and schema integration. The basic component classes in the system are

Next generation software environments : principles, problems, and research directions

The past decade has seen a burgeoning of research and development in software environments. Conferences have been devoted to the topic of practical environments, journal papers produced, and commercial systems sold. Given all the activity, one might expect a great deal of consensus on issues, approaches, and techniques. This is not the case, however. Indeed, the term "environment" is still used in a variety of conflicting ways. Nevertheless substantial progress has been made and we are at least nearing consensus on many critical issues.The purpose of this paper is to characterize environments, describe several important principles that have emerged in the last decade or so, note current open problems, and describe some approaches to these problems, with particular emphasis on the activities of one large-scale research program, the Arcadia project. Consideration is also given to two related topics: empirical evaluation and technology transition. That is, how can environments and their constituents be evaluated, and how can new developments be moved effectively into the production sector

A database model for object dynamics.

Object-oriented database systems, Dynamic object re-classification, Object role model, Dynamic class hierarchy, Object migration