1Object Security Attributes: Enabling Application-specific Access Control in

This paper makes two main contributions towards estab-lishing support for application-specific factors in middleware security mechanisms. First, it develops a simple classification framework for reasoning about the architecture of the security mechanisms in distributed applications that follow the deci-sion-enforcement paradigm of the reference monitor. It uses the framework to show that the existing solutions lack satisfy-ing trade-offs for a wide range of those applications that require application-specific factors to be used in security decisions while mediating access requests. Second, by introducing attribute function in addition to decision and enforcement ones, it proposes a novel scheme for clean separation among suppliers of middleware security, security decision logic, and application-logic, while support-ing application-specific protection policies. To illustrate the scheme on a concrete example, we describe its mapping into CORBA Security