M.: Managing security in objectbased distributed systems using Ponder

Security management involves specification and deployment of access control policies as well as activities such as registration of users or logging and auditing events for dealing with access to critical resources or security violations. The management actions to be performed when an event occurs depend on the enterprise policy. Reusable composite policy specifications are important to cater for the complexity of large enterprise information systems. Analysing policies for conflicts is essential for the safe operation of the system. This paper describes the Ponder language for specifying policies for security management of Distributed Systems. Ponder is declarative, stronglytyped and object-oriented which makes the language flexible, scalable and adaptable to a wide range of security requirements. 1