A Con guration-based Environment for Dealing with Multiple Security Policies in Open Distributed Systems

In today's eld of distributed architectures there is a need for environments allowing the easy development of applications consisting of heterogeneous software modules and running on heterogeneous hardware platforms. From the security point of view, the challenge for such environments is to permit the interoperation between applications specifying di erent, possibly inconsistent security policies. This paper proposes a practical approach for dealing with the coexistence of di erent security policies in distributed architectures. In particular, we integrate security in a con guration-based distributed programming environment, and we demonstrate the capabilities of resulting environment to allow easy speci cations and compositions of security policies.