A Connguration-based Environment for Dealing with Multiple Security Policies in Open Distributed Systems Position Paper

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 interop-eration between applications specifying diierent, possibly inconsistent security policies. This paper proposes a practical approach for dealing with the coexistence of diierent security policies in distributed architectures. In particular, we integrate security in a connguration-based distributed programming environment, and we demonstrate the capabilities of resulting environment to allow easy speciica-tions and compositions of security policies.