A security design for a wide-area distributed system

Abstract

Designing security of wide-area distributed systems is a highly complicated task. The complexity of underlying distribution and replication infrastructures together with the diversity of application scenarios increases the number of security requirements that must be addressed. High assurance requires the security enforcement to be isolated from non-security relevant functions and limited in the size of implementation. The major challenge in the is to find a balance between the diversity of security requirements and the need for high assurance. This paper addresses this conflict using Globe system as a reference framework, and establishes a security design that provides a flexible means of addressing the variety of security requirements of different application domains.