Design and implementation of distributed access control infrastructures for federations of autonomous domains

Abstract

Federations of autonomous domains allow resource sharing in a highly dynamic manner, improving organizational response times and facilitating cooperation between different information systems. To accomplish this, it is essential to provide a scalable and flexible mechanism that allows security management and acts at application level independently of operating system or platform. In this paper we present a scalable solution that enables interoperation between different systems participating in a dynamic federation, while it also allows the participating systems to retain their autonomy; we present the software architecture of this distributed access control enforcement mechanism and describe our implementation choices. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.