A New Model of Security for Metasystems

With the rapid growth of high-speed networking and microprocessing power, metasystems have become increasingly popular. The need for protection and security insuchenvironments has never been greater. However, the conventional approach to security, that of enforcing a single system-wide policy, will not work for the large-scale distributed systems we envision. Our new model shifts the emphasis from \system as enforcer " to user-de nable policies, making users responsible for the security of their objects. This security model has been implemented as part of the Legion project. Legion is an object-oriented metacomputing system, with strong support for autonomy. This includes support for per-object, user-de ned policies in many areas, including resource management and security. This paper brie y describes the Legion system, presents our security model, and discusses the realization of that model in Legion