A New Model of Security for Distributed Systems

Abstract

With the rapid growth of the information age, electronic activities of many kinds are becoming more common. The need for protection and security in this environment has never been greater. The conventional approach to security has been to enforce a system-wide policy, but this approach will not work for large distributed systems where entirely new security issues and concerns are emerging.We argue that a new model is needed that shifts the emphasis from "system as enforcer" to user-definable policies in which the cost scales with the degree of security required. Users ought to be able to select the level of security they need and pay only the overhead necessary to achieve it. Moreover, ultimately, they must be responsible for their own security. This research is being carried out in the context of the Legion project. We start by describing the objectives and philosophy of the overall project and then present our conceptual model and tentative implementation plan. A set of technical challenges is also addressed.