The Design of Petrus

Mar 29, 1996

Abstract

Recent researches in distributed systems favor the construction of object-oriented components. Object Oriented distributed systems stresses low coupling and high local autonomy among components. Security systems such as Kerberos and SPX, however, require participants to agree unanimously on a single level of security and the same security mechanism. This runs the risk of tightening the coupling of the system.

We design and implement a security architecture called Petrus to allow flexibility in the level and enforcement of security policy without comprimising the overall security of an object system. For the talk, an overview of the Petrus system will be presented.