The Role of Trust Management in Distributed Systems Security

Existing authorization mechanisms fail to provide powerful and robust tools for handling security at the scale necessary for today's Internet. These mechanisms are coming under increasing strain from the development and deployment of systems that increase the programmability of the Internet. Moreover, this increased exibility through programmability" trend seems to be accelerating with the advent of proposals such as Active Networking and Mobile Agents. The trust-management approach to distributed-system security was developed as an answer to the inadequacy of traditional authorization mechanisms. Trust-management engines avoid the need to resolve identities" in an authorization decision. Instead, they express privileges and restrictions in a programming language. This allows for increased exibility and expressibility, as well as standardization of modern, scalable security mechanisms. Further advantages of the trust-management approach include proofs that requested tran...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1999
• Where: ECOOPW
• Authors: Matt Blaze, Joan Feigenbaum, Angelos D. Keromytis
• Keywords: Authorization Mechanisms, Distributed And Parallel Computing, ECOOPW 1999, Trust-management Approach, Trust-management Engines