language: en

Integrating Security in a Group Oriented Distributed System

Michael Reiter Kenneth Birman Li Gong
Dept. of Computer Science Dept. of Computer Science ORA Corporation Cornell University Cornell University
675 Massachusetts Ave. Ithaca, NY 14853 Ithaca, NY 14853 Cambridge, MA 02139
reiter@cs.cornell.edu ken@cs.cornell.edu li@cambridge.oracorp.com

Abstract A distributed security architecture is proposed for incorporation into group oriented distributed systems, and in particular, into the Isis distributed programming toolkit. The primary goal of the architecture is to make common group oriented abstractions robust in hostile settings, in order to facilitate the construction of high performance distributed applications that can tolerate both component failures and malicious attacks. These abstractions include process groups and causal group multicast. Moreover, a delegation and access control scheme is proposed for use in group oriented systems. The focus of the paper is the security architecture; particular cryptosystems and key exchange protocols are not emphasized.

1 Introduction