Security Agent Based Distributed Authorization : An Approach

This paper considers a security agent based approach to authorization in a distributed environment. A security agent is used to capture the privileges and a part of security policy in distributed authorization. Principals make use of these agents to carry out their requests on remote hosts. Targets verify the authenticity of the security agent and its privileges and use them together with their local security policy to grant or deny the requests. The paper describes the operation of the authorization system using these security agents and how these agents can be used to support dynamic decision making. Finally, the paper also considers how the security agent based model answers the taxonomy questions that arise in the design of capability based secure systems.