Dynamic Authorization Support in Large Distributed Systems

96 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2000.Traditionally, a system can only be trusted after it has been formally proven trustworthy. However, due to the inherent complexity of distributed systems and the limitation of formal methods, trust based on factors other than formal logic verification has to be included in designing and developing security services for these systems. Motivated by several on-going research efforts in studying the distributed trust management problem, this thesis proposes a new simple certification scheme that supports distributed name-spaces, dynamic trust management and the specification of application specific security attributes. An object oriented certificate framework has been designed and developed to implement this new scheme. This framework also incorporates an innovative usage of mobile code to specify fine grained delegation conditions flexibly and efficiently. Experiments with a prototype implementation show that the increased flexibility and expressibility adds little performance overhead to the certification system.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD